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Book 7T& 

Copyright^? 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



-An American 
Fruit - Farm 

Its Selection and Management 
For Profit and for Pleasure 



By 

Francis Newton TKorpe 

ti 

Member of the 
State Horticultural Association of Pennsylvania 

With 21 Illustrations 



The Face of the Master 
is good for the Land.'* 

Cato, On Farming, 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New Yorh London 

£be *HmlcfeerE>ocfcer iprese 

1915 






Copyright, 191s 

BY 

FRANCIS NEWTON THORPE 



Ube fmfcfeerbocfeer press, Iftew 12orft 

©CI.A397844 

MAY -4 1915 



Co 
MARION HAYWOOD 

AND 

MARION EDGERTON 
THORPE 



CONTENTMENT 

Fancy dishes ? No. Remember, 
June 's for roses, — not December ; 
Take things in their season ; 
Vex not life with vanity ; 
Served or serving, take it simply, — 
With good cheer and reason. 

After Horace, Carmen XXXVIII. 



FOREWORD 

THE fruit-farm, of which this book is a record, 
lies in the Lake Shore Valley, on the southern 
shore of Lake Erie, in Pennsylvania, a region 
rich in horticulture. The book is a record of many 
years' experience at home, of much observation 
abroad, and is offered as a modest contribution to a 
subject of greatly increasing interest in our own 
country. Successful horticulture implies ceaseless 
attention and obedience to the laws of climate, 
planting, and cultivation, not excluding such 
elements as soil-fertility, labor, administration, 
and birds. The biography of any well-conducted 
fruit-farm is a chapter in the history of success. 
Horticulture in America is opportunity, but as yet 
we are merely at the threshold of knowing how to 
use the land. The illustrations are from photo- 
graphs taken — with three exceptions — on the fruit- 
farm whose history is here related. 

F. N. T. 



Indian Arrow Vineyards, 
April, 1915. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I. — Time and the Tree i 

II. — Selecting the Fruit-Farm ... 33 

III. — The Planting of the Fruit-Farm . . 71 

IV. — Getting along with Help . . .113 

V. — The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm . 131 

VI. — Feeding the Land . . . . .175 

VII. — The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks . 211 

VIII.— Ten Thousand a Year .... 240 

IX. — Birds and the Fruit-Farm . . . 272 

X. — The Fruit-Farm and Old Age . .317 

Index 345 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Intensive Horticulture: Grapes, Plums, 
Cherries. Lake Erie to the North. ("Indian 
Arrow Vineyards") . . . Frontispiece ^ 



Abundance Plum-Tree; Producing 52 Baskets 
(1913) 

Overlooking the Vegetable Garden 

An Althea Hedge (In Five Colors) in August 

In the Cherry Orchard; Notice the Trees (15 
Years Old) Kept Trimmed Low for Easy 
Picking 



In the Cherry Orchard . 

Amidst Vineyards; the Chautauqua Hills 
ft.) in the Distance (South) 

In Grape Time. (Crawford Vineyard.) 
Erie to the North 



A Tank for Spraying 

Gang-Plowing ■ . 

Disc-Plowing 

The Two-Horse Cultivator 

Sowing Alsach Clover 



(1300 
Lake 



16 * 

28 S 

48 ^ 

64*^ 

80 y 

98 V" 



104 

128 






140 

144 
148 
186 s 



s 



xii Illustrations 



PAGE 



horse-hoeing i90' 

Spraying a Young Vineyard for Leaf-Hoppers. 

(Mallick Vineyard) ..... 206 

The Steam-Power Sprayer for Trees and Vines 222 

Tree Spraying; Plum Trees. (Loop Orchard) . 234 ^ 

The Driveway through the Fruit-Farm . . 254 ^ 

Packing Fruit for the Market at the Packing- 
House ........ 260 

A Bird Sanctuary. Lake Erie in the Distance 308 " 

A Corner of the Fruit-Farm. Lake Erie in 

the Distance ...... 318 * 



-An American Fruit-Farm 



An American Fruit-Farm 



TIME AND THE TREE 

SHAKESPEARE'S song, "The Greenwood 
Tree," is enough to enroll his name among 
the immortals. A tree, like a man, requires asso- 
ciations to give it dignity and virtue. Contrast 
the newly set sprig with the old tree in the orchard : 
hope and realization; promise and potency; lone- 
liness and association. Time seats the tree in 
dignity and power. When orchard and orchardist 
grow old together, they weave associations about 
the fruit-farm. Labor sanctifies as it breaks with 
the wild. The house you built, the orchard you 
planted, the vines which have passed through 
your hands as cuttings, yearlings, and purple fruit 
become part of the landscape of your life, old famil- 
iar faces which smile even when the sky frowns. 
And if there were loved ones whose willing hands, 
now quiet, helped; whose voices, now silent, en- 
couraged, — all has the touch of the altar. 

So we grow old with the trees, though their wild 



2 An American Fruit-Farm 

outburst of new life in springtime seems obliter- 
ative of any thought of age. Year after year we 
follow the season: time builds roots and sprouts 
into vineyards and orchards; the barren, lonely 
field becomes whispering trees, swinging vines 
white with blossom, green and red and purple with 
fruit. The fruit-farm grows before our eyes, yet 
never can we see or hear one leaf or one twig grow. 
The miracle of Nature unfolds before us and we feel 
the indescribable joy and power of creation. The 
infants come on together, in cradle and in field, 
and we measure orchard and vineyard by the years 
of our first-born. But dates are a foreign fruit. 
In the Valley, who can truly tell, after a dozen years, 
the age of vine or tree? We only know that with 
the years come fruit and more fruit, as with child- 
hood come youth and manhood. 

We do not expect a child to do a man's work, 
nor a young tree or vine to do the work of an old 
one. Time bids the fruit grow and makes the 
fruit-farm. Yesterday we marked off the land, 
and set out the little trees and vines; to-day the 
children on ladders are picking the red cherries; 
the trees are fifteen years high. Two thousand 
bushels? And we ourselves cleared away the 
primeval forest and planted the orchard. It seems 
like being present at creation. Did we plant two 
thousand bushels of scarlet cherries when we set 
those whip-stocks? Incredible. To-day the pur- 
ple grapes in the children's baskets. Four tons 
on the acre? Did we plant four tons of grapes 



Time and the Tree 3 

when we set out these six hundred and six Concord 
cuttings each with its fringe of root about a little 
stick of vine ? A thousand baskets of purple prunes ? 
Did we plant a thousand baskets of prunes when 
we planted those small, spinous, scraggly sprigs? 
Two hundred bushels of raspberries? And when 
did my neighbor plant a thousand baskets of 
peaches? Or were they peach sprouts, a few inches 
high that now are dark, rich, shining green boughs, 
bending low with luscious fruit? Time and the 
Tree, Man and Nature wrought this miracle; a 
glorious treasury of associations. "Yes," you 
say; "cherries at three dollars a bushel; grapes at 
thirty-eight dollars a ton; peaches at one dollar 
a basket; raspberries at five dollars a bushel, are 
associations, very tender associations; give me, 
I pray you, a hundred acres of such associations!" 

True, the fruitful orchard and vineyard form 
peculiar associations with the world at large; such 
associations as half reconcile the young fruit-grower 
and his young wife "to try it another year." 
Suppose five, ten, twenty, fifty years and acres 
of cherries, peaches, prunes, grapes, berries. What 
of the associations of a lifetime? Shakespeare 
knew the meaning of his song, "Under the Green- 
wood Tree." He knew the harsh world and the 
kindly tree and would rather entrust himself to 
wintry weather beneath its boughs than to a wintry 
world which holds man in no kind association. 

There is wisdom in trees. Use the old ones; 
plant new ones; no fruit-farm is made in a day. 



4 An American Fruit-Farm 

Therefore mingle the old and the new; the fruit- 
ing vine and tree and the young orchard and 
vineyard of your own planting. Your bearing vine- 
yard and orchard carry the burden of the fruit- 
farm; while the young vineyard and orchard are 
growing, the old are bearing fruit. Many a would- 
be fruit-grower interprets expectation as perform- 
ance. He may read, or maybe is told, that three 
years make a vineyard; seven, an orchard, — and 
truly, but not a self-supporting orchard or vine- 
yard. Seven years for the vineyard; six for the 
peach orchard; ten for the prune or the cherry, 
yes, fifteen; then tree and vine are fully at home 
and at work; each has formed its associations and 
bears plentifully. The inexperienced fruit-grower 
must live while orchards and vineyards are growing 
into productivity. These are the waiting, the 
trying years, when expenses mount high and 
income falls low, — unless your old orchards and 
vineyards are bearing the burden and heat of the 
day. It is the bearing, not the merely growing 
plant that makes the fruit-farm. He is a wise 
manager who has both. One hand washes the 
other; the old vineyard buys the new one. You 
will not mortgage the old in order to plant the new. 
You will more wisely perfect the old in order to 
have the new; you will intensify your cultivation 
of the old in order to bring the new into being. 

Fruit-farming is becoming so exact a vocation, 
things new quickly become old. Neither orchard 
nor vineyard is planted or cared for as a generation 






Time and the Tree 5 

ago. On land worth from four hundred dollars 
to one thousand dollars an acre we cannot afford 
to make mistakes, — in selection of variety, in 
planting, in trimming, in spraying, in soil-making, 
in cultivation, whatever the detail. On most 
fruit-farms, — once grain or stock farms, — which 
may be called " converted farms," the orchard or 
the vineyard is planted as we would not plant it 
to-day. Usually trees, vines are set too close 
together; varieties are poor, ill-adapted to climate 
or soil or market, and neither orchard nor vine- 
yard has had the right care. The soil has been 
depleted ; the vitality of the plant is sub-normal and 
we must rehabilitate the trees and vines. This 
may be possible and may be done if truly eco- 
nomical. But one must carefully count the cost. 
Can he afford to let the ground, with all its possi- 
bilities, remain as now occupied, or should he 
clean it off and start anew? The practical fruit- 
grower alone can answer this. My own experience 
is that we cannot afford to let the land do less than 
its best. Practically it is a question of living; the 
fruit-grower's living. Can he afford to have his 
land in the most appropriate and therefore the 
most profitable fruit? On expensive land one 
must raise a relatively profitable crop, and on 
cheap land one can afford to raise no other. Three, 
five, seven, ten years quickly pass. The golden 
rule, the supreme rule of the fruit-farm is, "Do 
what ought to be done at the proper time." If 
you are young, you have the credit of youth, — 



6 An American Fruit-Farm 

and its chief asset is time. If you also have capital, 
you have two credits. Use your credit, it is your 
capital. Better use your credit than lose time in 
planting orchard or vineyard, or in attempting 
to nurse a worn-out vineyard or orchard back to 
health and productivity. Possibly it may be done, 
but so rarely, and with such cost of labor and time, 
that a wholly new deal is preferable. It is time 
that makes the Tree, and Time and the tree make 
the fruit-farm. Better tear out unprofitable varie- 
ties and plant profitable ones than to suffer the 
years to pass and your fruit-farm become mere 
vines and shade trees. The annual labor bills are 
as high for poor varieties as for good ones. 

It costs more to run an unprofitable than a 
profitable orchard. Time works for you or against 
you with equal vigor. Your fruit-farm is deteri- 
orating, your neighbor's is improving, — and at 
the same time. I have never heard of the fruit- 
farmer who got ahead of his varieties, but I have 
heard of varieties that forced the fruit-farmer be- 
hind. A Concord grape is preferable to a score, 
yes, to a dozen score of other varieties for the Lake 
Shore Valley. In other valleys conditions may be 
different. We must farm with conditions, not 
against them. A Montmorenci cherry is prefer- 
able to an Early Richmond, yet we may hesitate 
to cut down bearing Richmonds and set in Mont- 
morenci; but we need not set out the objectionable 
variety, and if our orchards are yet young, we may 
well afford to supplant the defective with the profit- 



Time and the Tree 7 

able tree. Gradually the wise fruit-grower works 
his entire farm over into only the best varieties, 
the most profitable kinds for his farm. A fruit - 
farm cannot be made in a day, though it may be 
seriously injured in less time. Every experienced 
orchardist or vineyardist sooner or later has had 
to face the problem of remaking his fruit-farm. 
The vineyards planted a generation ago are poor 
in variety; the rows are too close to permit use of 
modern tools and, notably, entrance of the sprayer. 
The expense of working this old-fashioned part 
of the plantation is out of all proportion to the 
returns from it. What shall he do? If he does 
the right thing he will make a clean sweep of the old 
vines and set the vineyard entirely new. Within 
five years he will have received profits more than 
sufficient to compensate him for temporary loss, 
and his new vineyard will serve him his lifetime. 
The old vineyard could become only worse as the 
years pass. Clearly the ledger account shows what 
should be done in such a case. Likewise with an 
orchard. Old, dying, neglected trees of poor 
variety cumber the ground. Cut them down; 
root out the stumps; plow deep; set new stock. 
Even though you may not gather fruit from your 
new orchard, it is a new orchard; it improves the 
value of your farm. As an asset, you have the 
new orchard even if it may not bear for several 
years. The purchaser prefers to buy a new or- 
chard to an old and unprofitable one. And doubt- 
less you will be the owner when the trees begin to 



8 An American Fruit-Farm 

bear. A fruit-farm is quite like a railroad. Road- 
way and rolling-stock must be of the best and must 
be kept up with the times, or accidents multiply, 
dividends fail, the line goes into bankruptcy. 
The fruit-farm must be kept at highest efficiency; 
no other condition is worth having. On the stern 
basis of profit and loss the best conditions are the 
most profitable, cost as they must. 

While all this is going on, associations are form- 
ing; rooting deeper than tree or vine; rising higher 
than leaf or fruit. Your fruit-plantations become 
part of yourself; the woof and web of your think- 
ing; the background of your memories; the scene 
of your activity. And the children have grown 
up with you and the vines and trees. But of 
children one must speak conditionally: they did 
not make the fruit-farm and their associations 
are not yours. The farm has been your educa- 
tion, not theirs. Each generation thinks its own 
thoughts and your posterity will not, cannot see 
themselves in vineyards and orchards as you see 
yourself. In a mysterious sense each lives unto 
himself. You cannot live your child's life any 
more than could your father live your life. True, 
you have ancestral memories, but they seem, after 
all, of another world, not of yours. 

What then becomes of the fruit-farm? Usually 
it passes to strangers, just as it came to you. 
They must repeat the story: build associations, 
enjoy for a season, and pass the opportunity on 
to strangers. It is ever the case of Time and the 



Time and the Tree 9 

Tree. They who plant orchards and eat the fruit 
of them think of them as a man thinks of his own 
children, — more tenderly than of other children. 
Your children cannot know your association with 
the tree because they did not plant it. Now and 
then we meet a man or a woman — usually a bache- 
lor or a maid — who, in lack of other lovables, 
cherishes the farm because of ancestral associa- 
tions. This differs from the pride which flourishes 
on genealogical trees. That your ancestors came 
over on the Mayflower is a matter of pride, but 
that these orchards and vineyards were your 
father's before you, or that you planted them your- 
self, gives a different sense of association. It is 
possible for you to have feelings with your parents 
or for their work, but sympathy, in this sense, is 
impossible between you and any Puritan on the 
Mayflower. You may as easily establish sympa- 
thies with your ancestors of the third century. 
Time and the Tree form associations but not 
longer than two generations. A man is proud that 
his farm belonged to his great-grandfather because 
this points to family dignity and stability, but he 
can have no lively associations further back than 
his parents. 

As the years pass, our associations become more 
tender, our plantation more productive: a curious 
commingling of sentiment and potatoes. The 
lively sense of possession always kindles the 
faculty of appreciation. What man, past middle 
life, sitting on his porch and casting his eyes over 



io An American Fruit-Farm 

vineyard and orchard which have witnessed his 
activities, will not reminisce, reciting the changes 
in his day. "When I came here — " he will 
begin, and narrate at length the transformation 
he wrought till you wonder whether this now 
prolific center, humming with modern life, can 
possibly, within one short span of life, have been 
the wild he pictures. But we all do fade as a leaf, 
and the leaves fall every year. 

To the young this transformation is only a tale 
that is told. I have heard old settlers tell of bear 
and deer, of elk and wolves abounding in the 
Valley; of wandering Indians; of itinerant preach- 
ers; of journeys in saddle; of dollars rarer than 
are diamonds now; of pewter dishes and wooden 
spoons; of linsey-woolsey clothes; of hand-looms, 
and corn planted between the stumps of the new 
clearing. Could these pioneers return they would 
be unhappy. They would miss this ancient world; 
they would miss the hand-looms and the saddle- 
horses; the pewter plates and the bowls of mush 
and milk ; they would miss the venison, and the ser- 
mons two hours long; the primeval forest, the vines, 
the flowers, the meager fruits of their day. Suffi- 
cient unto the day is the happiness thereof. We 
would not be happy in their shoes, nor they in ours. 
Their associations could not be ours, nor ours theirs. 
Neither can ours be our children's. Each genera- 
tion must form its own, for it can enjoy no other. 

We cannot then expect our children to think of 
our fruit-farm as do we. We have made it our 






Time and the Tree n 

home; it is only the nest for the children; and the 
young birds do not know the value of the old nest ; 
they seek their own. Can our fruit-farm become 
as the nest to the birds of the forest, or be home to 
our children as it has been home to us? The 
answer must be as the way of the world, — each 
after its kind. I have never known a man to think 
as highly of his father's house as of the house he 
builds for himself. Time and the Tree make the 
fruit-farm, but the tree must grow under your 
own hands and within your time. There are 
bridges which carry one generation over into 
another. Sometimes children and grandchildren 
play about the fruit-farm and a new sowing of 
associations is made, a new harvest gathered. 
From father to son; from son to grandson the 
fruit-farm passes, each generation like the Tree 
which Time grows on the place: an embodiment 
of associations; memories in the flesh. Doubtless 
as land becomes valuable in America, and the 
struggle for a livelihood the sharper, families will 
cling to the fruit-farm as a protection, an anchor 
to windward, a safe investment, a dependable 
source of a livelihood. The land of New York 
City has as great commercial value as all the farm 
land between the Mississippi and the Atlantic 
north of Georgia. Its value lies in its scarcity 
and the profitable use, largely the monopoly use, 
that can be made of it. Farm values are higher 
in America to-day than ever before, and they 
increase faster than population. 



12 An American Fruit- Farm 

The choice fruit regions of America are favored 
locations, few in number and of limited area. Land 
values within them are now higher than elsewhere 
in the country. They will ever be higher than 
other farm lands. Sometimes the bonds and 
stock of a corporation become so valuable that they 
are never in the open market. Heirs do not part 
with them. Fruit-farms are the favored estates 
in America, more favored than coal or mineral or 
lumber lands, for these, once exhausted, are of 
slight worth. Fruit-lands properly managed are 
inexhaustible. Cato knew this two thousand 
years ago and advised his countrymen to adapt 
the culture of their lands to the wants of the times. 
The history of Rome is the history of the land; 
so too is the history of France, of Germany, of 
England, Scotland, Ireland. The history of Amer- 
ica is the history of the land, more difficult to 
understand because land in this country has ap- 
proximated personal property in ease of transfer, 
— an innovation unknown in any other country. 
The history of the Fruit Valley is the story of its 
land. Climate holds the pen. 

The man who has spent his life building up a 
fruit-farm knows that little remains at the close 
that existed at the beginning. The tree, the vine, 
the shrub, the root of to-day, is not that of a few 
years ago. The old has passed ; the new is passing. 
Those hungry, thirsty cells which in earth or air 
are drinking in plant-food will themselves soon 
become plant-food. Half a ton of leaves grow on 



Time and the Tree 13 

the apple tree this summer and every leaf falls 
to the ground and perishes. This ring of wood 
thinly protected by a coating of bark will, in a 
few years, be near the center of the tree. Hardly 
a shred of the vine we plant will exist in ten years. 
Posts and stakes rot away, are cast into the fire, 
and turn to ashes before our eyes. We scatter 
them over the vineyard which they once so stoutly 
held up to the sun. The berry bushes we planted 
vanished long ago. What is there here now that 
was here a quarter of a century ago? We have 
laid out new roads and alleys; we have torn down 
and rebuilt houses and barns. The life of the 
place is new. We have changed. The picture of 
ourself on the wall is of another man who did not 
think as we think now. His eyes looked out upon a 
different world. Yes, Time and the Tree have been 
busy. And these faces at the board, these bright 
eyes, these new beings sitting in the old seats, 
these children roaming, sporting under the shadows 
are newcomers, brought by Time and the Tree. 
And we turn to the ledger of the old days, the days 
of small things; there are hundreds of tons and 
thousands of bushels now. Then we thought a 
hundred bushels a portentous crop, and to-day 
not a tree on the fruit-farm of that kind ! 

Yet Time is never weary and the Tree is ever 
growing. Not only is it ever green but ever fruit- 
ful. It is a wonderful tree, very much like folks, 
a bundle of associations. You call the apple 
"Seek-no-further," but I call it the fruit-farm. 



14 An American Fruit-Farm 

The fruit-farm is a vast clock which marks off 
the seasons in bold lines, not by months and min- 
utes but by the coming and going of blossom, fruit, 
and leaf. Nature has her routine, first the leaf, 
then the bud, then the full corn in the ear. We do 
not say it is July, but cherry-picking time; not 
October, but the time of grape harvest. So is it 
time to trim orchard and vineyard; to plow; to 
spray; to cultivate; to look over the farm tools; to 
apply potash; to sow the soil-crop; to harvest and 
market the fruit. A cherry tree is a natural time- 
piece and the fruit-grower goes by the tree rather 
than by his watch. The weather winds the farmer's 
clock. In all his work there is a leisurely haste and 
the wonder is of so prolific a crop from relatively 
so slight effort. He plants an orchard, feeds the 
soil, cares for the trees, and gathers hundreds of 
bushels of cherries, yet at no time was he rushing 
about, or seemingly in haste like the broker, the 
head of a corporation, or a young capitalist. And 
there are others who, like the Canterbury Pilgrim, 
seem busier than they are. The fruit-grower is 
busier than he seems. He has a relay of helpers: 
in the powers in earth and air; in chemical forces 
which make our planet habitable. He has only 
to hitch his own efforts to their wagon and he is 
brought in due season to the market where he 
would be. 

When we consider how few are the food-makers 
in this world, we may well be astonished by the 
amount of food-products. Travel as you may in 



Time and the Tree 15 

America — and it is also true in other lands — you 
see few people at work in the fields. Orchards, 
vineyards, fields of grain, of vegetables, of berries, 
stretch away before your eyes and not a man any- 
where at work, — perhaps one here or there resting 
on his hoe-handle, or hitching the team, or tinker- 
ing at a tool. Yet the vision is of orchards and 
vineyards and fertile fields. What might happen 
were the production of food intensive rather than 
extensive? If every rood of ground produced its 
full contribution under complete cultivation? 
Such intensification is hinted at to-day on our 
best fruit-farms. Why not eight tons of grapes 
to the acre? Five hundred bushels of cherries? 
Three hundred bushels of prunes? Three tons of 
gooseberries? One thousand baskets of peaches? 
It is not impossible. Only two factors are essen- 
tial: man and climate. There is always risk of 
the enemy: untimely storms, wind, that break 
down the orchard and the vineyard; hail that cuts 
tree and vine and shrub into shreds ; late frosts that 
kill buds and early frosts that destroy fruit; light- 
ning that consumes rows of grapes and fruiting 
trees ; insects that devour all green things, and fungi 
that suck the life from root, stalk, leaf, and fruit. 
The weather is freakish and has no respect for 
man. Between man and weather there is ever 
distrust, frequent war, and final surrender by 
him. Yet, seedtime and harvest are his security; 
Nature will have her own, and despite wind and 
weather. 



16 An American Fruit-Farm 

With the fruit-grower things rarely turn out as 
well as he hopes or so badly as he fears. No man 
can weigh the fruit on the vine or tell the number 
of bushels in the orchard: Cherries hang in count- 
less red balls and grapes in countless purple amidst 
the green. Nature may know how many; we 
take to the scales. Who has ever heard in April 
of the failure of the Delaware peach crop? If my 
memory fails not, the farmer's crop always fails 
somewhere in April; I speak by the newspapers. 
But in the Lake Shore Valley in April and May, 
grapes are always to be a heavy crop ; they blossom 
in June. In July, the crop is always "less than 
last year"; in August, the berries swell and color 
and look quite pompous; "a bumper crop," say 
the newspapers. In late September and through 
October, is the harvest. Your vineyard returns 
as you gave to it. No soil, no vine; no vine, no 
wine. Your grapes weigh up to your feeding of 
the soil. Nature knows her own. You starved 
your land and now you starve; you fed your land 
and now it feeds you. In the Valley, Nature 
keeps a strict ledger account with every acre and 
its owner and returns investment of care with 
interest, but discounts all poor farming. Feed 
the Concord vineyard well and every year it faith- 
fully responds, and it is the only plant in the Valley 
which never fails to respond. Other plants take 
a year off, — cherries, plums, peaches, apples, prunes, 
currants, but the Concord never takes a vacation. 
You can depend upon it to bear you a harvest as 



Time and the Tree 17 

ample as your treatment of it is careful. So on 
your fruit-farm, the vineyard in April, July, August, 
October, is ever evenly, quietly, bountifully, re- 
sponding to your care. It is the almanac of 
your life; it marks the divisions of your activities. 
You bank on your vineyard; you hope for your 
orchards. Grapes there will be, — cherries, prunes, 
peaches, apples, there may be. Even the acres of 
showy bloom may not mean cherries. Wind and 
rain, untimely, may wash the prospective cherry- 
crop to the ground. Cherries are occasional. 
Yet the fruit-grower may make the occasion; he 
may make a cherry crop every year in his soil. It 
is an art, but not elusive. The soil-less man has 
no cherries in his soil. He who puts them there 
in potash, phosphoric acid, nitrogen, and humus, — 
clover, vetch, soybeans, stable manure, and drains 
the earth bottom and top to keep the pores open, 
and so sets soluble plant-food circulating through 
it, finds them all later in the golden fruit on the 
trees. And he never finds on tree or vine any 
fruit he has not first deposited in the ground. Here 
the miracle is seen: for every cherry he hides in 
the earth he picks many a handful on the tree. So 
it is quite possible that the fruit-grower banks 
both on his vineyard and his orchard. The chances 
are on his side. 

Feed thy tree 
And it feeds thee; 
Feed thy vine 
And make thy wine. 



18 An American Fruit-Farm 

Way back in the Middle Ages men sang this 
little verse, — and it was made in Germany. Some 
have learned it in America. Every fruit-grower 
should learn it by heart and frame it in orchard 
and vineyard. It looks very pretty on the face 
of the farmer's clock. It is always reflected in 
the cheery face of the successful fruit-grower. I 
know would-be fruit-growers who have never 
learned it; never practiced it. They demand 
"bumper crops" every year of orchard and vine- 
yard and curse the barren trees because they do 
not give something for nothing. By and by their 
fruit-farms are for sale. Sometimes the sheriff 
wants the farm so badly he takes it. Then the 
late owner will tell you how to raise fruit, much as 
the man whose horse has been stolen tells you how 
to lock the barn. "It is better," says Cato, "to 
buy from a man who has farmed successfully and 
built well." And again: "When you inspect the 
farm, look to see how many wine-presses and stor- 
age vats there are; where there are none of these, 
you can judge what the harvest is. Know that 
with a farm, as with a man, however productive 
it may be, if it has the spending habit, not much 
will be left over." 

Feed the land at the right time; care for it in 
season and you will harvest in season. It seems 
a simple rule, yet its simplicity is its difficulty. 
The unselfish man begins with his land: "I feed 
you; you feed me"; this is his working formula. 
Something for something, but never something for 



Time and the Tree 19 

nothing. Nature abhors a vacuum because she 
cannot fill it. If you dig a gulf you must raise a 
mountain. If you gather potash in eight-pound 
baskets, during the grape harvest, you must de- 
posit potash long before harvest. "What!" you 
exclaim, "a ton of potash! $47.83 buried in the 
earth! Ruination! I cannot afford it! There 
is nothing in horticulture at that rate!" Now we 
know that two tons of grapes contain thirty-nine 
pounds of potash, eleven pounds of phosphoric 
acid, and thirty- two pounds of nitrogen; and that 
most of the crop is water. If we have picked a 
hundred pounds of potash from the soil we cer- 
tainly should return a like amount, and well can 
we afford to. Doubtless there was potash in the 
soil unavailable as plant-food ; we must keep up the 
supply. It is only the available potash that feeds 
the grapes. "The great doctrine of availability," 
which Webster remarked, with bitterness, was 
exemplified in the nomination of General Taylor 
for the presidency and which worked his triumphant 
election, is also exemplified in grapes and cherries 
and all other fruits. You can have them if you 
make your plant-food supply available. This is 
the ancient game and play of fruit-growing. You 
do not put a ton of food into the acre of orchard 
or vineyard, yet the crop consumes many tons. 
You gather, say, four tons of grapes or eight tons 
of cherries to the acre. You scatter perhaps half 
a ton of fertilizer and plow in a clover crop. 
Nature returns you fruit of greater weight than 



20 An American Fruit-Farm 

that of the plant-food you have deposited, — and 
she ever will, howsoever much plant-food you 
deposit. She always keeps a reserve; she is look- 
ing out for her own rainy days. She must always 
have something in the treasury. Earth and air 
help you ; the laboratory of the soil turns out more 
than you put into the crucible. It reminds one 
of the transformation of natural gas into gasoline, 
yet natural gas contains no gasoline. Surely the 
mystery of fruit-growing is bewildering. Yet, 
were you to hold back your pinch of potash or 
wisp of straw, your land would not feed pounds of 
potash, of nitrogen, of phosphoric acid, and of 
straw to your trees and vines. 

It seems then, that Nature helps the fruit-grower 
who helps himself. "With me you prosper; with- 
out me," she says, "you perish." Some men, 
considered by the world to possess monumental 
generosity, say to the charity: "Raise a dollar 
and I will give you fifty cents"; or, if desperately 
generous, they say: "Raise a dollar and I will give 
you another." Then the campaign opens and 
nobody has any peace; and the giver of the second 
dollar insists that the college shall be named after 
him. To the fruit-grower Nature says: "Give the 
soil a spoonful of plant -food and I will give a ton." 
Nature is forgotten and the fruit-grower has the 
tree named after him. And this is going on all the 
time. Scratch the earth and it yields a cherry; 
feed it and it yields tons of cherries. 

At whatever angle we approach the fruit-farm 



Time and the Tree 21 

we sooner or later arrive at the center — the soil. 
Tell me the soil and I will describe its owner. It 
is his alter ego. Dust we are and back to dust we 
go, and while we live we are keepers of the dust. 
Yet all do not seem to know this. May we not 
assume that as soon as there was opportunity for 
soil on the earth man appeared? He is the only 
animal that makes soil and deliberately gets his 
living from it. Not only does he look before and 
after, he is the soil-maker. If you will but weigh 
this against his other creations, you will discover 
that it is his most important contribution to his 
own civilization. "Oh that mine enemy would 
write a book!" exclaims the hungry critic. "Oh 
that my friend would transform land into soil!" 
exclaims the hungry man. The high cost of living 
means the low production of soil. 

But the earth has its seasons like the sky, and 
the laboratory of the soil is more active at some 
seasons than at others. I once knew a farmer who 
planted corn while sitting in slippers, in a rocking- 
chair, on the porch, reading the New York Evan- 
gelist. He did not get enough from his cornfield 
to renew his subscription to the paper. Another 
farmer I knew raised record crops of corn and could 
not read or write. The ancient Lake-Dwellers, 
on Lake Geneva, raised wheat. I have seen their 
wheat, — black, oxidized grains sealed in a bottle 
in the De Candolle Collection; but the Lacustrines 
sang their songs like Homer; they never bothered 
themselves with reading or writing. They raised 



22 An American Fruit-Farm 

wheat. One of the startling revelations to the 
graduate of the agricultural college, and of col- 
leges in general, is the big crop which the man of 
the diploma does not raise and the steady crop the 
unlettered fruit-grower always raises. This does 
not count against the college but for the unlettered 
farmer. He reads books in grapevines, sermons 
in cherry stones, and crops in everything. He 
cannot give scientific names to root-worm or 
brown-rot, but he can exterminate them by spray- 
ing at the right moment. He never thinks of the 
chemical properties of the soil beneath his feet, 
but it is as loose as ashes and filled with humus. 
His regular and heavy harvests tempt you to dis- 
parage his college-bred neighbor who takes samples 
of the earth, fills bottles with queer liquids, makes 
tests, and tells you that the land lacks nitrogen. 
"Too much sorrel," remarks the unlettered neigh- 
bor. "The land is sour; sow clover, soybeans, or, 
best of all, cover it deep with barnyard manure. 
That is what is the matter with your land." Both 
tell the truth, and each by his own tests and through 
his own formula. Shall we dispraise either fruit- 
grower, him who knows the chemistry of the land 
or him who knows the meaning of sorrel? Each 
acts up to his knowledge and sorrel was grow- 
ing before chemical laboratories were endowed. 
Practically, one is as wise as the other. But 
there is a difference. The fruit-grower, who also 
is a soil-chemist, saves, conserves time. Knowl- 
edge is a short-cut to the flour barrel, as well as a 



Time and the Tree 23 

dangerous thing. The Swiss Lacustrines raised 
wheat four thousand years ago, but less to the 
acre than does the wheat-farmer of to-day. Knowl- 
edge outlined at agricultural colleges is not unlike 
prepared food ; it has the ingredients of nutriment. 
But we prefer ordinary meat and drink. For 
extraordinary service, for much labor in brief time, 
for the weariness and exhaustion of great risks, 
and for carrying capacity cut down to lowest 
terms, as when reaching the Poles, or marching 
against the enemy, — concentrated food has its 
uses. 

It is every man's experience that he must know 
his machine, his task, his labor, in order to utilize 
the scientific conclusions duly worked out in his 
own vocation. The fruit-grower must know his 
own land, his own soil — its composition, vitality, 
productivity. Fruit-instinct is a pearl of great 
price. The best horseman has best horse-sense 
and the word has become the world's metaphor. 
Fruit instinct is not given with diplomas at agri- 
cultural colleges. As Webster said of eloquence: 
" It cannot be brought from far; it exists in the man 
and in the occasion." The fruit-grower with 
fruit-instinct can raise fruit despite agricultural 
college, or experimental station, just as the man 
with the scholar's instinct may become learned 
despite Harvard or Wisconsin. There is a sub- 
stitute for instinct and that is knowledge ; it is not 
instinct. They differ. A farmer by instinct will 
always raise more cherries to the acre than will the 



24 An American Fruit- Farm 

farmer by mere knowledge. It is instinct that 
keeps the race on the planet, — not new knowledge. 
But as the agricultural college cannot make a 
fruit-grower, no more can the medical school make 
a doctor, the law school a lawyer, or the engineer- 
ing school an engineer. It is the man himself, 
not the school. The diploma is only a certificate 
that he passed the college way. But knowledge 
must be the capital and resource of most men; the 
genius among farmers is rare. Luther Burbank 
is unique, but he can set thousands of lesser men to 
work improving varieties: to produce paper-shell 
and other walnuts; to improve oats, wheat, and 
barley; to reclaim the deserts with cactus; to 
improve flax, hemp, and cotton; to increase the 
yield of clover, timothy, and alfalfa; to improve 
peas, beans, and tomatoes; to add even a better 
potato than the Burbank; to better all kinds of 
berries; to improve grapes; to work out perfect 
plums, apples, prunes, without seeds; to make 
quinces delicious raw and to double the productive- 
ness of the cherry ; to improve the pear, — in brief, 
he can tell posterity how to apply his methods and 
discoveries and thus to increase immeasurably the 
world's supply of food. Men by knowledge can 
learn to carry on what he began with instinct. 
The agricultural college, like any other training 
school, helps plain people learn how to make a 
living. There is only one kind of scientific work. 
There is only one scientific method in fruit-farming. 
There are different approaches to this method. 



Time and the Tree 25 

It is therefore a question whether the would-be 
fruit-grower will turn out a fruit-grower, or only 
a medium through whom the title to the land is 
transferred to some man who is a fruit-grower by 
instinct. The ''natural farmer" shines like the 
"natural painter," the "natural musician," even 
the "natural doctor," or the "natural engineer." 
Nature fits most men for something, but not always 
for fruit-farming. Almost any man believes that 
he can do light farming; that if he had only a well 
equipped fruit-farm he could "get along nicely" 
and even run the risk of getting rich. Nature in 
due time — very infrequently, and but once — pro- 
duces her Raffael, her Beethoven, her Shakespeare, 
her Angelo. It is the fashion of the world to 
praise the ornamental, the luxurious, and to over- 
look the practical and the necessary. "Arms and 
the man, I sing"; "Achilles' wrath I sing," — so 
open JEneid and Iliad. War, passion, beauty, 
statecraft, crime, wickedness, — not fruit-farming, 
are the subjects of the story. Cato, it is true, 
more than twenty centuries ago wrote on Farm 
Management, but it is not literature as is the 
Germany or the Agricola of Tacitus. The Ec- 
logues of Virgil are of the oldest literature of farm- 
ing, but they dwell on the passions of men, not 
on cherries or corn. It is hard to make poetry 
out of a quart of berries save by assimilation, and 
that is not poetry but chemistry. Perhaps our 
units of measure of things and men need revision. 
Virgil, first to put the peasant into literature, 



26 An American Fruit-Farm 

makes him a churl, a slave. Shakespeare's farm- 
ers are all boors, the butt of ridicule, as are his 
laborers of any calling. Only in the modern novel 
of "real life" is the farmer the hero of the story. 
Adam Bede has a soul as well as a jack-plane, and 
passions quite as picturesque as Scott's Antiquary. 
But the farmer has at last got into literature, and 
has come to stay. American life has compelled 
recognition of his rights and privileges as a man. 
Democracy runs to farmers as theocracy to priests. 
Ours began as a nation of farmers. 

" By the low bridge that arched the flood, 
Their flags to April's breeze unfurled; 
Here the embattled farmers stood 

And fired the shot heard round the world." 

The arrow-maker, the sword-maker, the maker 
of the war-harness, the gun-maker, the ship- 
builder, the money-maker, — why not the food- 
maker? No Virgil or Shakespeare hereafter will 
make the farmer the boor and butt of his story. 
Indeed the echoes of Mantua and Abbotsford now 
print themselves in taking-titles of new novels 
which bring swiftly to mind green orchard boughs, 
sweeping vines, purpling fruit, and the stress and 
storm of life on the farm. This life is made the foil 
to the life of the city, that we may know the 
commonplace of commonplaces: whether in the 
bank, in the White House, or on the farm, human 
nature is quite the same. A man's a man whether 
under an apple tree or over the roof of a sky- 



Time and the Tree 27 

scraper. So in latter days, literature has dis- 
covered the fruit-farmer: all in due time. In the 
almanac of letters the fruit-grower has his date. 
Some people will discover mere respectability 
in all this; finding it in a book, they will believe it. 
This discovery is merely their own. The fruit- 
grower is a man with a special instinct. Napoleon 
was an excellent farmer but took too much time 
for military exercises. Yet his farm — France — 
is a better farm because of his farming. He ex- 
hausted the French, but not France. 

Washington was a farmer, and though much 
absent from his plantation, on military excursions, 
he neither exhausted the Americans nor Mount 
Vernon. And we know that he preferred his farm 
to the presidency. I have long considered him 
the greatest of Americans, and much of his great- 
ness was due to his instinct for farming. Cincin- 
natus, in the old Roman story, owed all his fame 
to his reputation as a farmer. Jefferson too, was 
a farmer, and has recorded his conclusions in one 
of the most famous of books, his Notes on Virginia: 

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of 
God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts he has 
made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine 
virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred 
fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the 
earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a 
phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an 
example. It is the mark set on those, who, not looking up 
to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the hus- 



28 An American Fruit-Farm 

bandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casual- 
ties and caprices of customers. Dependence begets 
subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and 
prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the 
natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes 
perhaps been retarded by accidental circumstances: but, 
generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of 
the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its 
husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy 
parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure 
its degree of corruption. . . . The mobs of great cities add 
just so much to the support of pure government as sores 
do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners 
and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. r 

In our day, as in other days, in all countries, 
at all times, men love to get back to the land. This 
points to their natural avocation; circumstances 
have made them senators, judges, lawyers, manu- 
facturers, railroad-men, writers, doctors, sea- 
captains, bankers, and so on through the weary 
list. Many a good fruit-grower has been spoiled 
in the lawyer, the doctor, the merchant. Happy 
is the man who is doing what he is best qualified 
to do, particularly if he is by instinct a fruit- 
grower and grows fruit. In our day the world is 
reaching this conclusion. Young men are looking 
to fruit-raising as a vocation, as they look to other 
vocations. Like banking, railroading, mining, 
practicing law or medicine, or engineering, fruit 

1 Notes on the State of Virginia. Written by Thomas Jefferson. 
Philadelphia, Printed and Sold by Prichard and Hall, in Market Street, 
Between Front and Second Streets, M.DCC.LXXXVIII. Query XIX. 
P- 175- 



Time and the Tree 29 

land is an opportunity. It is not merely that 
fruit-raising may be commercially profitable but 
that it is a business worthy a man's best services. 
In other words, there is a career in fruit-raising 
as in war or mining, in printing, publishing, or 
manufacturing. Fashion governs the world and 
fruit-farming is in fashion. It is not a disgrace 
to raise potatoes, or cherries, peaches, or grapes. 
Is it a disgrace to raise puppies, or kittens, or 
triple-combed roosters? Yet a cattery is not 
precisely like a fruit-farm. 

In Cato's time every senator owned a huge piece 
of Italy. Landownership meant aristocracy, and 
to this day the landlord is the master among men. 
Every nation, at some time, gets land-hungry and 
it is land-hunger that keeps the world a military 
camp. I know that there is a vociferous part of 
mankind that calls property robbery and land- 
ownership tyranny. Therefore, it says, "Own 
no land." The more people the less land, yet the 
land is no less. This inverse ratio of land and 
people partly explains its appreciation. And as 
fruit-lands are limited in extent and are uncommon, 
such lands are most prized of all. These lands 
are clocks on the earth's surface, marking time. 
The fruit-grower knows his time-piece and so 
regulates his activities. He never winds the clock; 
it is a perpetual self-winding time-piece. It tells 
him when to plant and when to cultivate; when 
to trim and when to gather the harvest. What 
farmer ever carries a watch, save to a wedding, a 



30 An American Fruit-Farm 

funeral, or to meeting! He can farm a lifetime 
without one. In the Valley, the lake breeze tells 
when it is four o'clock afternoon, and the clover 
also marks the hour. No less precise are the 
shifting of the air-currents at nine in the evening; 
at three in the morning. The cherry tree is a dial, 
and the moving shadow of the grape-vine marks 
off the hours. But these are the finessing of the 
clock; there are the great divisions of the seasons. 
Winter begins when the leaves fall and ceases 
when again they start. Spring begins with the 
call of the soil and ends with the setting of the fruit 
on vine and tree. Summer begins with the grow- 
ing grapes and cherries and ends as they ripen; 
and autumn — briefest of seasons — slips in between 
the purpling fruit and the leaves rustling at your 
feet. All in due season. 

And then, there is within the man a mysterious 
interpreter of the seasons, — that instinct which 
moves him to do and do. By that subtle power 
he reads the clouds in the sky; the invisible winds; 
the rising and setting of sun, moon, and stars, and 
the shades and colors on the living earth. It tells 
him when to plow and to sow; when to cultivate 
and to harvest; and in following it he does all 
things in season. 

In planning the fruit-farm we must remember 
the days. Strawberries ripen in June; grapes and 
prunes in October. As the fruit-farm is a cycle 
of the seasons, each arc of the cycle may register 
its fruit. With care we may have a succession of 



Time and the Tree 31 

fruits quite through the year. The links of this 
fruit-chain are strawberries, cherries, raspberries, 
dewberries, blackberries, plums, apples, peaches, 
grapes, nuts, and the gifts of the garden, between: 
radishes, salads, peas, beans, onions, beets, pota- 
toes, corn, okra, egg-plant, — each in succulent 
varieties. One must live, and he may live well, 
on the fruit-farm. The table may have fresh fruit 
the year round if one will but take the trouble 
to secure it. Few fruit-growers take the trouble. 
If the housewife is also fruit-grower, helper in 
orchard, berry-field, and vineyard, she will prove 
to you that you cannot pick cherries and make 
cherry pies at the same time. But if the labor 
supply is thriftily used, cherries will be picked and 
pies will be made. Nearly every fruit may be 
kept sound for a time in cold storage, and kept 
indefinitely, provided it is dried, pickled, or canned. 
Much of this art and mystery lies on the distaff 
side of the house. Apples, prunes, and grapes will 
keep long: the apples, unbruised, in barrels, if 
kept cool; the prunes, sound, in shallow boxes, cool 
and dry; the grapes, unbroken, in dry sawdust, 
such as is used in packing California grapes. Set 
these treasures in a room tempered all the time 
just above freezing, and they will keep themselves 
for half the year. Garden produce as all bulbs, 
tubers, and roots, keep best in cool, dry sand, 
above freezing, but no fruit will keep (save air- 
tight) beyond the season when its kind again is 
forming. Evidently fruit preservation is a prob- 



32 An American Fruit-Farm 

lem of temperature and exclusion of air, and I may 
add, of light. The fruit-cellar therefore becomes 
a conserver of supplies: it is a clean, airy, cool, 
ventilated, dry room, usually below ground. It is 
not an ice-house. The great clock of Nature 
marks off the farmer's time: to do and what to do. 
Neither too early nor too late, but in season is the 
law of the fruit-farm. Nature hates to be nagged 
and refuses to make up anybody's lost time. There 
is a tide in the affairs of the fruit-farm which leads 
on to fortune. It must be taken at the flood. 
No man can run a fruit-farm on an ebbing tide. 
Nature gives man and beast, plants, and all living 
things their food in due season; but she has no 
supplementary hours; no extra seasons; she is 
reduced to the lowest terms. Instinct tells the 
fruit-farmer all this. Some fruit-farmers learn 
it as a task of the day. But whether by instinct 
or by knowledge, the farmer knows his clock, 
though he never winds it; and though he can not 
set the hands backward or forward, he can move 
precisely with them. 



II 



SELECTING THE FARM 

CLIMATE and location determine the value of 
the farm. In selecting the site, we must 
consider climate first, for we are prisoners of 
climate. It is climate that determines what seeds 
shall grow and what shall not. Farming is only- 
one of the uses man makes of climate. It is be- 
cause of climate that the earth brings forth fruit 
after its kind. Location means convenience, and 
the most convenient use of climate is the most 
convenient use of the land. Yet all land is not 
equally convenient for use. The man himself 
must know. He contributes to the conclusion of 
the whole matter, for his decision in choosing a 
climate determines his future. There are climatic 
belts, or regions, each having possibilities and 
limitations. Man cannot change these. The 
kind of farming possible depends upon climate; 
therefore one must go to the proper region for 
fruit-land, grain-land, or grazing-land. True, 
tropical fruits may be made to grow in hothouses; 
man may supply the climate after the fashion of 
things artificial; but we do not look for orange 

3 33 



34 An American Fruit-Farm 

groves amidst snow-banks. The supreme law 
in farming is adaptation. Perfect adaptation 
means perfect farming, and degrees of adaptation 
shade off into utter failure. The farm is largely 
man-made; it cannot be said to be wholly natural. 
Indeed, the most productive farms are adaptations 
which illustrate man's farthest departure from the 
wild. Such adaptation, for human ends, exempli- 
fies the best use of climate. Thus a ranch in the 
Lake Erie Valley, or a vineyard among the Idaho 
mountains is not an example of the nice adaptation 
of climate to human wants. The sun settled this 
matter ages ago. 

Usually, in seeking a farm, a man is dominated 
by his associations. Nearness to the old home, to 
friends, to city or town, determines his choice 
rather than the suitableness of the land itself to 
the uses he purposes to make of it. The idea is 
common that any land will raise anything possible 
within the zone in which it lies. Thus most people 
believe that oranges and cocoanuts grow in strings 
along the equator, and apples anywhere in the 
temperate zone. Yet we are assured that all 
grains and fruits, all roots and leaves and stalks, 
used by man as food, thrive best close to the north- 
ern, or southern, limit of climatic production, 
like oranges in Jaffa, Florida, and California, 
and wheat in British America. If a man would 
raise any farm product in perfection, he must 
select his farm within the climatic belt adapted 
to such production. This means specialization in 



Selecting the Farm 35 

farming on a grand scale. In a general way every 
man considers climate when he deliberately locates 
his home. He thinks at least of the extremes of 
heat and cold, of drouth and rainfall, of sunshine 
and cloud. His instincts guide him. He inherits 
from his kind the experience of the ages ; from cave- 
dweller and lake-dweller, from the man of the Stone 
Age, of the Bronze Age, and of the Iron Age, — 
from that innumerable throng of men and women 
who have filed across the earth from the beginning, 
bequeathing to him experiences of long ago which 
yet dominate our lives. Most serious of experi- 
ences is of the art of making a living. So man 
considers wind and weather when he seeks a home. 
In a rude way he avoids total failure, for wind and 
weather drive him into a corner in which he can 
eke out existence. If climate be not too unfavor- 
able, he concludes that he has made a good choice. 
At least he proceeds to farm his land. 

But most men come into possession of a farm 
without being consulted about the climate. Each 
thus receives a tool as a gift and continues to 
handle it as did his fathers before him. So near 
is he to wind and weather; so close a prisoner of 
climate is he, life with him is static ; he gives climate 
no serious thought, save to grumble at the biting 
frost, the scorching heat, the engulfing rain. Who 
has not witnessed the transformation of a region 
from grain to fruit; from potato fields to truck 
gardens? The thoughtless farmer is ignorant of 
his own sky and tries to raise wheat when he 



36 An American Fruit-Farm 

should be growing peaches; grapes, when he should 
sow his fields to buckwheat. It is the old story of 
the round farm in the square hole; of meadows in 
Florida and orange groves in Vermont. 

Within any climatic belt, the chief problem for 
the farmer to solve is the selection of the site for 
his farm. This means, primarily, convenience. A 
well-located farm is like a corner lot on Broadway. 
Remembering always that land unadapted to farm- 
ing cannot be made farm land by mere location, 
of two farms the better located is the more valu- 
able. Everybody desires convenient land, — that 
is, land most accessible for making a living. Good 
roads shorten the distance to market and cut down 
the cost of farm administration. The test is 
transportation. A farm many miles from the 
city but connected by good transportation is nearer 
the city than another lying quite close yet inacces- 
sible. Location determines the cost of farming. 
Land remote from markets, though producing 
heavy crops, eats itself up in transportation; the 
farmer is attempting the impossible. He may 
starve amidst plenty. Poorer land well located is 
worth more than choicer land badly located. The 
best farms being best located always command 
the highest price; they cost most and pay best. 

Climate is the constant factor in farming; the 
value of location varies with world conditions. 
Every inch of American soil was once out of rela- 
tion to the world-market. Much of it is now in 
relation to that market and lands are ever coming 



Selecting the Farm 37 

into favorable location. The larger currents of 
world events, the smaller American currents, 
affect land values. Within fifty years the wheat 
region in America has shifted from the Middle 
States to the Western, centering about Illinois, 
and again northward, across Minnesota, into 
Canada and British America. The potato belt 
has removed from the latitude of Boston and 
Chicago to that of northern Maine; the cotton 
belt, from the Sea Islands of the Carolinas to the 
coast of Texas. Truck-farming is more profitable 
in Florida than on Long Island. Nature, that 
is, climate, makes this possible. Transportation 
solves the problem. Every market town in Amer- 
ica is now close to the fruit-lands of California, 
the cotton fields of Texas, the truck-farms of 
Florida, the vineyards of Chautauqua and the 
Lake Erie Valley, the potato fields of Maine, the 
berry fields of New Jersey, the tobacco fields of 
Virginia and the Carolinas. Though we commonly 
think in terms of our political geography, our real 
geography is economic, — a geography of lines of 
trade and travel, of railroads and steamship lines. 
The real distances in America are best learned in 
the market place. 

Lines of trade and travel, general and local, 
determine the value of location, and by such lines 
must be understood the available ones. A through 
railroad may traverse a farm, yet the farm itself 
may be practically many miles from a railroad. It 
is the most accessible farm land that is most 



38 An American Fruit-Farm 

valuable for farming. Most purchasers must be 
content with " second best" land, — with the less 
or even the least valuable location. One must 
come first, or command equivalent resources, would 
he have the pick of the land. Every farm has its 
price, and youth and cash are the best credit. 
Land best located is a permanent asset and may 
be sold at any time with slight risk of loss. In 
ease and opportunity of transfer such land re- 
sembles the most valuable personal property, such 
as jewels and the precious metals. He who owns 
the farm everybody wants owns the best farm. 
The best located farm is, economically, the most 
productive. Primacy of location is the supreme 
advantage. Only the wise man discovers this. 
He recognizes the possibilities of the site; he fore- 
sees favoring changes, — markets, roads, trade, 
commerce, associations. 

Or, indifferent to conveniences, the investor 
ignores all demands save his own, subordinates 
himself as a world-producer and selects a site 
exclusively pleasing to himself. He deliberately 
cuts himself off from relations which the world at 
large demands. He locates in isolation, apart, 
by himself, remote from men; beyond the whistle 
of steamer or train ; beyond trolleys and even be- 
yond automobiles. He builds a retreat, a little 
world of his own. His site, however delightful to 
him, cannot be called other than exceptional. Few 
shall ever desire it; it is not a commercial article. 
His is the exception, not the rule, in locating a farm. 



Selecting the Farm 39 

His isolation is in these days artificial. The world 
to-day lives in, by, and through its relationships. 
He ignores them. In this he consults his own mind. 
He pays the price of isolation precisely as another, 
who has primacy of location for every convenience, 
pays the price of his primacy. A home in the 
woods, remote from the haunts of men, has its 
price, and to many, a prohibitive price, just as to 
many, corner lots on Broadway and best located 
farms have a prohibitive price. So, after all, 
valuation depends upon the man. In him we 
come to the inconstant quantity. His tastes, 
ideas, whims, theories, notions, desires, passions, 
determine for him the value of any land. His 
selection of a site is determined by his racial 
instincts, his age, his education, his temperament, 
his previous associations. If his motive be wholly 
to buy and sell, his choice differs from that of him 
who yields to sentiments of association. Men at 
some time turn to the scenes of their childhood 
and youth. Many never remove from these scenes. 
Some select a farm within a region with which they 
are familiar because there they feel at home and 
know how to proceed. In other words, these 
have most courage when on their native heath. 
But thus to yield to sentiment may be to ignore 
the laws of climate and location. 

Very few men proceed, as one may say, scien- 
tifically in the selection of a farm. New Zealand 
may, scientifically, be preferable to a township 
in Pennsylvania, but you locate in the township 



40 An American Fruit-Farm 

without for a moment weighing the superior oppor- 
tunities of New Zealand. Indeed, the instances 
of scientific procedure in locating farm lands are 
almost limited to capitalists who combine for 
profit in the exploitation of a region, as a Texan 
fruit-belt, or a wheat-belt in British Columbia; 
rubber fields in Central America, or guano beds 
On the Pacific islands. 

Ordinarily the man who buys a farm buys within 
a region limited by his own associations. He buys 
land which reflects himself. The farm is a landed 
edition of himself. The so-called economics of 
farming is essentially the psychology of the farmer. 
He doubtless never thinks of himself as a psy- 
chologist. His mind is his farm. The psychology 
of farming may seem an obscure, not to say a rare 
and uncertain crop, though it truly includes all 
the labors of the farmer all the days of the year. 
He may miss the moon at bean-planting, but he 
cannot escape the psychology. Indeed, the psy- 
chology of farming is the function of which the 
farmer is unconscious his life long. But in select- 
ing the site for his farm he responds to this func- 
tion. No nice analysis of motives strains his 
mind, when, rapidly casting his eye about him, he 
resolves that the site suits him, or can be made 
to suit. He desires himself in the site and so is 
satisfied. 

When you have decided to purchase a farm [says Cato, 
that rare old Roman farmer], be careful not to buy rashly; 
do not spare your visits and be not content with a single 



Selecting the Farm 41 

tour of inspection. The more you go, the more will the 
place please you, if it be worth your attention. Give heed 
to the appearance of the neighborhood, — a flourishing 
country should show its prosperity. When you go in, 
look about, so that, when needs be, you can find your way 
out. Take care that you choose a good climate, not 
subject to destructive storms, and a soil naturally strong — 
in a healthy situation, where labor and cattle can be had, 
well watered, near a good-sized town, and either on the sea 
or a navigable river, or else on a good and much frequented 
road. Choose a place, which has not often changed owner- 
ship, one which is sold unwillingly, that has buildings in 
good repair. Beware that you do not rashly contemn the 
experience of others. It is better to buy from a man who 
has farmed successfully and built well. * 

What motive, then, in buying a farm? To sell 
again and quickly, at a profit? Then you are a 
dealer in real estate, not a farmer. Do you buy 
in order to indulge in an avocation? Then it is 
diversion you are seeking. Would you experiment 
with seeds, roots, and soils? Then it is a chemical 
laboratory or pure science you are after. Are 
you timid as to stocks and bonds, shares and in- 
dustrials generally. Then it is an investment you 
seek, — something you may be able to find when 
you would take an inventory. Do you want the 
farm as a home — a site for yourself where land 
and sky, the procession of the seasons, springtime 
and harvest, rain, snow, hail, fungi, insects, and 
the pleasant anxieties of life weave their warp 

1 The copy of Cato on Agriculture which lies before me bears the date 
1598, is the edition of John Meursum, printed at Antwerp, by Plantin. 
I follow the admirable translation of Fairfax Harrison. 



42 An American Fruit-Farm 

and woof? Then you say to yourself: "Here 
will I live; I have found the site on which to 
make my farm." Imagination translates oppor- 
tunity into realization: this is the psychology of 
farming. 

The Chautauqua fruit-belt in New York and 
the Lake Erie Valley in Pennsylvania extend for 
fifty miles parallel with the beach of the lake, 
beginning seven miles east of the city of Erie. 
This entire region is a narrow valley, not wider 
than six miles between the lake and the range of 
low hills to the southward. It is a rolling country, 
rising from the lake level to the crest of the hills 
some thirteen hundred feet. The hills are cut 
across by deep gulches, which begin at the crest 
and open northward and northwestward to the lake. 
The streams are swift and shallow, though in ancient 
times sufficient to cut chasms half a mile wide and 
in places three hundred feet deep. The exposure 
is of the earliest formations known to geology: the 
Silurian, the Devonian, and the Carboniferous, 
abounding in fossils both of plants and animals. 
The enormous elevation of this mass of hills gave 
the swift descent of waters to the lake and caused 
the extinction of possibly a dozen species of shell- 
fish whose remains now compose the rocky basis 
of the hills, — a vast heap of shell buried amidst the 
stone. For ages the waters have seeped through 
this formation, impregnating the entire Valley 
with a solution of lime. In the Lake Shore Valley 
is the oldest land on the globe and the rocks tell 



Selecting the Farm 43 

their own story. From the crest of the hills to 
the edge of Lake Erie these streams cut deviously 
upwards of a dozen miles. The ravines disclose 
layers of mollusks, coral, fossil lilies, cone-in-cone — 
that puzzling formation which awaits explanation, 
— and innumerable layers, in varying thicknesses 
of sedimentary rock. In this Valley the Garden 
of Eden has been located by a writer of some emi- 
nence in his day. Vestiges of inhabitants during 
the Stone Age abound in arrow-heads, spear-points, 
stone pestles and mortars, skinners, and rude pot- 
tery. The region is a fruit garden, whether or not 
Adam and Eve ever dignified it by their melan- 
choly presence. The land slopes northward toward 
Lake Erie, and the area suited to orchard and vine- 
yard is sharply defined by the crest of hills at the 
south, the lake at the north, the level plain of Ohio 
at the west, and the high hills of Chautauqua Coun- 
ty to the east. It is a narrow valley containing not 
over three hundred square miles. Within this 
domain grapes, berries of all kinds, peaches, pears, 
apples, prunes, cherries, cereals, melons, vegetables, 
grow in perfection, attaining the maximum in qual- 
ity and quantity. The contour of the Valley makes 
this possible. Fruit of any kind attains perfection 
at the northern limit of its production. The 
Valley marks this limit, for fruits that are adapted 
to it, in the United States. The lay of the land is 
favorable. It slopes towards the north, thus pre- 
venting too early start of sap, leaf, and bud in the 
spring. The soil is deep, as tested by borings of 



44 An American Fruit-Farm 

innumerable gas wells in the Valley, attaining a 
depth of one hundred and seventy-five feet in 
many places. Lake Erie tempers the weather, 
preventing extremes of heat and cold, making 
spring late and prolonging autumn till all fruits 
and the wood of the new growth are well ripened. 
The lake is part of an immense waterway, some 
two thousand miles long, a depression which is 
the natural highway for winds and storms, afford- 
ing perfect ventilation of a body of air warmer than 
otherwise would be found in this latitude. This 
ventilation secures against frosts and cold and 
storms of all kinds, for most storms which threaten 
the Valley move down the lake without harm. 
The lake winds protect orchards and vineyards, and 
every field they sweep, from untimely frosts. On 
an early September day, the traveler who passes 
over the crest of hills to the south of the lake and 
thus emerges into the edge of the Mississippi 
Valley notices at once a change of temperature. 
He sees a region blackened by early frosts. The 
demarcation is sharp: on one side of the highway 
purpling vineyards, peach trees bending low with 
fruit; on the other side, cornstalks blackened by 
frost, and everywhere the sere and yellow leaf. 
It is useless to attempt to raise fruit outside the 
fruit line of the Lake Erie Valley. Here, almost 
in sight of the lake, one may raise cherry trees for 
shade but not one cherry will ever ripen on the 
tree. 

Nor is this the conclusion of the matter; Nature 



Selecting the Farm 45 

protects the Lake Erie Valley with blankets of 
clouds from November till April, moderating the 
winter and thus sheltering all kinds of berries, 
vines, and fruit trees. The moderate snowfall 
is sufficient to cover the ground with this best of 
all winter covers. From May till November the 
weather is ideal, rarely attaining eighty degrees 
of heat, and the coldest winter day seldom shows 
zero weather. Within this Valley are upwards 
of thirty million grapevines in highest productivity ; 
thousands of acres of berries, peaches, apples, 
prunes, plums, cherries, melons, corn, wheat, 
potatoes, peas, beans, and vegetables. The Valley 
was the far "West" until a few years after the 
close of the Revolution, when settlers began enter- 
ing at the east from New England and New York, 
and from Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Pittsburgh, 
through the west, near Erie. La Salle discovered 
the region in 1679, while voyaging on the Griffon 
westward along the south shore of Lake Erie, 
accompanied by Father Hennepin, that charming 
romancer, and others, first of Europeans to behold 
this garden of the New World. Baron La Hontan, 
in 1688, penetrated the region at the command of 
Denonville, Governor of New France; and Charle- 
voix, in 1720, traversed the Valley, recording the 
prodigality of Nature, the abundance of wild apples, 
plums, grapes, the forests of nut trees, the deer, 
bear, elk, and buffalo on every side. It was 
Charlevoix who left the name " Aux Boeuf " which 
yet lingers in Erie County, though better known 



46 An American Fruit-Farm 

as French Creek. But it was not until Perry's 
victory in 1813, 

"On the tenth of September, 
The day we remember," 

that the western country became indisputably 
American soil, and New France — the hope of the 
great La Salle — became at last America. For more 
than half a century the Valley has been traversed 
by one of the principal railroads of the country, 
giving swift transportation to the markets of the 
world. To-day it is teeming with population and 
every rood of ground supports its man. There 
are many fertile farming regions in America; this 
is but one of them. Here fruit land sells for a 
thousand dollars an acre and some of it produces 
five hundred dollars an acre. If the net return 
be capitalized at five per cent., the land would be 
worth from seven to ten thousand dollars an acre. 
The explanation lies wholly in the climate. Nature 
has made the Valley a fruit garden. She has made 
other regions a fruit valley, a grain field, or a 
truck-garden. We are wise if we take her as she 
is, get on her side and use climate to supply our 
wants. We can do no more, and most of us do less. 
In selecting the site for a farm the purchaser 
rarely gives a thought to the geology of the region. 
He will discover, however, if he pursues the matter, 
that every fruitful farming region owes its fruit- 
fulness, as does the Lake Shore Valley, to climate 
and soil, — and that is as much as saying, to its 



Selecting the Farm 47 

geology and its climate. The immense produc- 
tivity of the Lake Shore Valley is due chiefly to 
its geology — to the lay of the land, hollowed and 
leveled, twisted and heaved perhaps sixty million 
years ago. Three hundred feet of dead shellfish, 
a mass of dissolving lime, is a strong basis for 
producing fruit. Elevation, the northern slope, 
perfect ventilation, the protection of a vast body 
of fresh water, a coverlet of clouds in winter, a 
deep and responsive soil, and primacy of location, 
impart qualities which are rarely combined. 

Many are the rich fruit valleys of America, each 
having charms of its own, but no man can describe 
life in all these valleys. Climate, soil, and the 
man are the three elements in every fruit valley. 
The accessories are only slightly less essential, — 
neighborhood, markets, transportation, schools, 
churches, amusements, relationships with the 
whole world. Any fruitful valley in America 
might be taken as a unit of horticultural measure ; 
comparisons make heroes of us all. If I have 
taken the Lake Shore Valley as a unit of measure, 
it is because of familiarity with that measure, not 
because other measures are lacking. The essen- 
tials of contentment are not on a sliding scale; 
ten thousand a year may not be had from fifty 
acres in any fruit valley. But the laws of fruit- 
farming apply in all fruit valleys, and whether 
we live in the east or the west, in the north or 
the south, in Pennsylvania or California, in Florida 
or Michigan, we must obey these laws. We must 



48 An American Fruit-Farm 

be careful of the type. So the three hundred 
square miles of the Lake Shore Valley hint at 
means and methods quite as significantly as do 
the larger or the lesser areas of other American 
fruit valleys. 

It might seem then that farming is a profession 
quite as truly as law, medicine, or theology. No 
longer can farming be continued by mere rule of 
thumb ; one of the oldest of occupations, it at last 
is becoming exact, — that is to say, scientific. 
There are thousands who yet do " light farming," 
and they have their reward. The call "back to 
the land" is a very worldly one because tested by 
all worldly tests it is profitable. If the farmer 
who owns the finest farm could at will turn it into 
an oil-field abounding with "gushers," he might 
not be unwilling to make the change. Many a 
farm has suddenly become a forest of derricks. 
The mere by-products of farming, — fresh air, pure 
water, pretty scenery, singing birds, and ever- 
changing skies cannot, as attractions, fully explain 
the return to the land now for some years going on 
in America. It is the products of farming which 
bring men back to themselves and to their own. 
Competition in every vocation is now so fierce, 
farming is discovered as an open approach to 
sanity and comfort. If this be true now when the 
population of America is but one hundred millions, 
what will it be three generations hence when popu- 
lation exceeds four hundred millions? How shall 
they get food? The land area does not, cannot 



Selecting the Farm 49 

increase. Yet the land must respond — and easily — 
by intensive farming. But first the wild lands of 
all the continents shall have been inclosed as farms. 
South America, the land-hunter's paradise, will 
fill up with immigrants long before the twentieth 
century shall have passed. But intensive farming 
has already begun in our America. Corn cannot 
be raised on Broadway, yet Broadway must have 
corn. Cities must be fed and the world henceforth 
will ever be demanding a yet more varied, abund- 
ant, and invigorating food supply. The essential 
measure of farm values is human necessity. Hence, 
in selecting the site for a farm, when the mind is 
made up as to what sort of farmland is desired, 
the would-be farmer may well pause and weigh 
conditions. In order to do business one must go 
where business is done. In order to farm success- 
fully, profitably, satisfactorily, one must use land 
best adapted to the sort of farming he affects. 
Climate, location, associations, are the three factors 
which properly determine the choice of the site. 
Climate determines all; soil can be made; so too 
railroads, highways, schools, churches, post-offices, 
markets. Associations grow. In brief, given a 
favorable climate and primacy of location, all 
that remains to be done man can do. 

All the traditions declare that health lies in 
farming, doubtless because no man can be a weak- 
ling and a farmer. The hayfield is supposed to 
restore lost health; when doctors fail, we take to a 
farm and carters. This tradition of identity of 



50 An American Fruit-Farm 

health and farming seems to be as old as the race. 
Yet in no vocation is invalidism a prerequisite. 
Farming compels good health for it puts the man 
to the test. No vocation demands abler or saner 
men. It is an illusion that farming does not 
require brains; that when a man has failed at 
everything else he may resort, successfully, to 
farming; that nobody can fail at that. The pro- 
fessional collector of statistics has neglected a field 
here quite untouched, as to the number of farmers 
who fail as farmers. Horticulture is expert-work 
and he who is not an expert need not hope to raise 
fruit, — perfect fruit and in ample quantity. There 
is a difference. To raise peaches and not peach- 
pits, merely, requires peach-thinking; not peach- 
pit thinking. A man's mind must be attuned to 
the keynote of his vocation, and his vocation is to 
be measured as it conduces to the general welfare. 
Thus to a healthy mind horticulture has its pleas- 
ures ; to a diseased mind, no vocation is pleasurable. 
We come then again to the man; his vocation 
depends upon his health. A sick fruit-grower 
means a neglected fruit-farm. The farm never 
misrepresents its owner. In order to have healthy 
farms the fruit valley must have healthy farmers. 
Mere residence on a fruit-farm does not generate 
either health or the fruit-farming sense. Fruit- 
farmers, like poets, are born, not made. 

Yet, ignorant as we are of the laws of health, we 
know that earth and air are the mother of sound 
mind and body. The billionaire who trudges 



Selecting the Farm 51 

barefoot through the dewy grass in chase of 
health is more likely to find it than by going bare- 
foot down Wall Street. The air of the fruit-farm 
has more ozone than the air of the office or the 
factory. So the conceit follows that health may 
be had simply by standing in the open on the farm, 
gazing at the scenery, and retaining your breath 
while you count seventeen. All this is a delicate 
compliment, possibly a tribute, to Nature, though 
rendered by a dress-suit. Were earth and air the 
sole elements of longevity, country people should 
die young as centenarians and many who knew 
Washington should still be among us. Indeed, 
some wide-eyed peasant should yet linger who 
could tell us whether Caesar fell in the Capitol or 
at the base of Pompey's pillar, and some domestic 
of Elsinore could give us back-stair information 
whether Hamlet was really mad. 

The fountain of perpetual age does not bubble 
up even on the best fruit-farm in the Valley, and 
I have seen but two and known but one cente- 
narian there. My neighbor, at seventy-five, is 
renewing his youth by returning, after fifty years' 
absence, to the old homestead, and is converting 
it into a fruit-farm. Yesterday, said he to me: 
"If I had only known what I was to miss in life, 
I would never have left the Valley; there is more 
pleasure and satisfaction in raising fruit than in 
any other occupation in the world. The trouble 
is, we do not find it out until we are old." He had 
spent his life in electrical engineering in many 



52 An American Fruit-Farm 

lands; had amassed a fortune. He had not tried 
all occupations, but he was now generalizing in 
very bold fashion. One of the best fruit-growers 
in the Valley became one after having given forty 
years of his life to the shoe business, acquiring 
wealth. "I wish I had begun at the start, and 
not when I was old," he said. "I never suspected 
what I was missing of pleasure," and he was 
thinking, though not aloud, "of profits also." 

"But the world," you reply, "is not composed 
wholly of successful electrical engineers and shoe- 
dealers; there are others." More money is spent 
to regain health than to keep it, and most men 
who have spent the first half of life making money, 
spend the second half in fighting disease and ward- 
ing off death. First part, gain; second part, pain, 
— is the story of most men's lives. And never a 
Crcesus who would not exchange his last ingot of 
gold for a loaf of bread and a stomach to digest it. 
"Skin upon skin, yea, all that a man hath will he 
give for his life." 

So again we come at last to the man, and princi- 
pally to his stomach. Give me the stomach and 
I will not only rule the world but will live forever, 
— if either were worth while! Fruit-farming, like 
every other vocation, is a case of stomach. No 
business concern will employ an invalid. The 
basis of life is physical whether you enter the army 
or the orchard. Nature promptly solves the prob- 
lem by applying her harsh law of survival. The 
world is not made of weaklings; every blade is a 



Selecting the Farm 53 

survival like the aggregate flora of the globe. 
There were no mules in the Garden of Eden though 
there are dinosaurs in the fossil beds. ^Eons ago 
these shrubs and trees and grasses of our wild did 
not exist, and asons hence they will be known only 
by the records of the rocks, — an imprint, here and 
there. We are all on our way to a niche in some 
museum. There were no Lincolns or Washingtons, 
no Shakespeares or Miltons, no Fultons or Edisons 
in the Age of Stone, nor can we foretell what shall 
be the type and service of man ages hence. But 
this we know, whether the age be Devonian or 
Miltonian, that the law of survival is working, 
and weaklings go to the wall. The world is for 
healthy people, though the lame, the halt, and the 
blind seem to possess it, and sickness the rule rather 
than the exception. Banish disease and death and 
soon we must remove to other planets for standing- 
ground. Or, would life's cycle close, and the gaps 
merely fill up? If the human machine wore out 
by age instead of breaking down by functional 
disturbance, decay of tissue, or accident, and men 
attained the normal bound of life's journey, would 
there be room and food for all? Having no experi- 
ence in this, the world can only theorize, but if 
analogy can guide us, man would live his cycle, 
like plants and other animals: no less, no more. 

The new books are always telling us that the 
average of life is increasing. It is the charm of 
doing slum-work — the "call" of the "submerged" 
to very worthy people — to extend life; and sta- 



54 An American Fruit-Farm 

tistics follow enthusiastically. The new gospel is 
a bath and an overcoat as against a straight dose 
of Calvinism, or heresy Literally it is now "wash 
and be clean.' 

The ideal farm-house of the pioneer was a 
kitchen and a cellar and an outside chimney; of 
the farm-house of to-day, a refrigerator, a bath- 
room, a porch, and a vacuum cleaner. The world 
is obsessed by Wesley's "Cleanliness is next to 
godliness," and some disciples reverse the saying. 
Ours is the age of soap and electricity, as was 
Lucullus's of peacock tongues and proscriptions. 
The age of pork and cabbage is past ; ours demands 
the dessert. 

Yet, despite statistics, Hull House, psychology, 
and desserts, we have more diseases to contend 
against than had Naaman or Louis XIV. We 
must take to spraying ourselves for insects and 
fungi as we spray our orchards and vineyards. 
Congestion of people and fruit trees has invited 
disease. Fruit-raising is artificial, a sort of open- 
air, hotbed work, — a case of floral over-population. 
The fruit-farm is a concentration of effort to trim, 
shape, and direct Nature to our liking. The 
Japanese grow trees in human shape and admire 
them as works of art and genius; the fruit-grower 
grows a cherry whose fleshy part exceeds that of 
a dozen cherries in the wild. All our fruits are 
monstrosities obtained by the exaggeration, or 
atrophy, of some part of the natural plant. We 
force the plant to run to a juicy pulp, to leaf, or 



Selecting the Farm 55 

bulb, as grape, apple, peach, potato, or currant, 
and thus, meddling with its balance of function, 
we make one part, say the pericarp, a giant, and 
leave other parts weaklings. The sole fate, seem- 
ingly the sole function, of weaklings is to perish 
untimely. So while we are raising cherries of 
mammoth size and exquisite color, we are killing 
the cherry tree. This is fruit -farming. Every 
cultivated plant is relatively short-lived. A fruit- 
farm is an assembly of plants more or less diseased 
because abnormal, and the burden of the fruit- 
grower's toil is to maintain them in a productive 
state. Defying Nature he yet depends on Nature. 
Inviting disease, he gives trees and vines medicine 
to cure it. He sprays leaf, stock, stem, flower, 
and fruit. He puts medicine into the soil as soluble 
plant-food. He stimulates the plant by cultiva- 
tion. He invades the life of the plant and enslaves 
it to his own ends. Domestication is interference. 
Despite this bold invasion and conquest, he 
maintains his plantation in sufficient health to 
consummate his purposes, and trees and vines, 
shrubs and roots bring forth some thirty, some 
sixty, some a hundredfold. The healthy fruit- 
farm is the farm which, year after year, bears its 
heavy harvest. This means that the fruit-grower 
has mastered the art of compelling Nature to 
produce a pericarp, a pod, a root, a leaf, a stem, 
to suit his ends. The plant no longer merely pro- 
duces seed after its kind, but fruit after the owner's 
kind. The difference is the difference between the 



56 An American Fruit-Farm 

wild and the fruit-farm. The hand of man is on 
the lever. Nature serves. Yet, let him once 
drop the lever, cease his care, remit his domination, 
and orchard and vineyard again return to the wild. 

Health breeds health. In maintaining the 
health of his vines he maintains his own. It is 
not a case of absorption but of use. "Use, the 
law of living," writes itself on men as on trees. 
We plow the grape row, not the porch floor. 
Italians are said to ripen bananas under the bed- 
clothes; peaches and grapes are grown in the open 
by the touch of the hand. This is a mystery that 
the owner can convert soil into baskets of fruit. 
In digging for gold in the potato patch the farmer 
finds it, in every bushel of potatoes. By tying 
grapes in the winter the viticulturist is able to 
pick off a hundred dollars an acre in October. In 
keeping orchard and vineyard in health, he keeps 
himself in health. Bankers, lawyers, — I will not 
say doctors, — manufacturers, merchants likewise. 
"Keep your shop," says Poor Richard, "and your 
shop will keep you." Keep your health and you 
can keep your shop. Men who fail in business 
usually fail in health. Failure means disease and 
sickness. Men lose their grip, and then, — "heart 
failure." So prosperous people are healthier than 
unprosperous. Like breeds like in all things, men 
included. Incentive is health. This gone, why 
breathe longer? 

On the fruit-farm there is always much to do; 
this is a secret of health. Disease loves the easy 



Selecting the Farm 57 

chair. Leisure usually is sickness and the doctor. 
If he is a lover of gold he will treat leisure with 
respect ; it is his best friend. There is leisure on the 
fruit-farm but not of the hopeless kind; it resembles 
Sunday, rather than an indefinite vocation. On 
Monday the weeds are still growing; indeed, they 
work full time, and botany fails to root them out. 
The fruit-grower's leisure is his opportunity to 
stop and think. The more the thinking, the more 
the fruit. Land thinks weeds and stones, unless 
you make it think fruit. Trees and vines think 
sprouts, insects, fungi, and toil for man. Once he 
gains the upper hand, there was never a more 
faithful servant than his orchards and vines, — 
indeed, his whole farm. But once it gets the upper 
hand, he is amidst the wild again, — a jungle of 
weeds, a tangle of superfluity, a burden of mort- 
gage and bad debts. No fruit-farmer ever catches 
up with lost time. Nature is punctuality. This 
is the greatest lesson learned on the fruit-farm. 
May-plowing cannot be done in July. Regular- 
ity of life is health. Nature loves rhythm and 
cycles, the regular swing of seed time and fruitage. 
Once the grower is in tune with his land and keeps 
on playing the tune, there is wonderful harmony 
in the harvest. But out of tune, he must expect 
barren orchards. It is not merely rising with the 
sun and going to bed with the Big Dipper that 
makes a fruit-farm; it is the work done between 
these interesting events that counts. Order and 
system are Nature's formula for health; so round 



58 An American Fruit-Farm 

and round and over again is the game. A scratch 
here and a scratch there do not raise peas or 
cherries. Each section of a farm at its best, the 
whole is a fruit -garden. 

This routine is Cato's, Washington's, Webster's, 
everywhere the best farmer's "succession of crops." 
This year this section has its soil-crop of clover, 
next year, that section; but a third section requires 
special treatment : we know the needs of the ground. 
We have a map of the farm always in mind, and 
we follow the principle of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, "all sections are equal." Regularity and 
routine are the conditions of fruit-farming, but 
the farmer must mix them with brains. Land has 
its peculiarities like folks and must be humored. 
A ton of ashes on this piece; a ton of phosphate on 
that: stable manure on this; Alsach clover on the 
other. There is no hard and fast rule; one must 
know his land. Here is occupation for leisure 
hours. 

We go much by colors in fruit-farming: a scanty 
growth of foliage, a light shade of green, a pre- 
mature brown, — we recognize the signs ; the soil is 
hungry for nitrogen. Small, scanty, dropping 
fruit means tree-hunger for potash. But abundant 
foliage year after year and no fruit means practi- 
cally the wrong sort of tree. Why cumbereth it 
the ground? We cut it down, grub out the root, 
and cast both into the brush-pile, strike a match 
and scatter the ashes around the tree that has both 
leaf and fruit. To trees as to persons that have 



Selecting the Farm 59 

much, much shall be given, and from them much 
is expected. The fruit-farm must not be suffered 
to run to shade trees. All this means thought and 
activity in the owner, — and activity and thought 
are health. 

But there are other friends on the fruit-farm, 
foremost among them "Nature dressed in living 
green." Our very interference with Nature inten- 
sifies as well as creates our interest in her. She is 
the undiscovered country, the unexplored mystery, 
the untried experiment. Our ignorance is her 
opportunity. Not that with knowledge come all 
our woes, but that the invasion of Ignorance and 
conquest over him is the god-like deed of man. 
In dressing land we clothe our own souls. It was 
the earth, the land, not Adam that was cursed, 
and to him dominion was given. The ancient 
story conceals life. Idleness is death. In subdu- 
ing the wild, man becomes immortal. Fruit- 
growing is a long process of land-conquest, as yet 
hardly begun. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon 
were made famous by the arches which supported 
them, not by the fruits and flowers they bore. 
It was the engineering not the apple that made 
them one of the Seven Wonders. On the fruit- 
farm it is still the engineering that works the 
wonder. It is the selection of the land, the making 
of the soil, the kind of tree and its planting, the 
cultivation of the ground which produce the won- 
der. This done, apples, peaches, grapes, cherries, 
berries follow as night the day; as echo, the voice. 



60 An American Fruit-Farm 

What have we in this bunch of red cherries and 
of purple grapes? Engineering. The man thought 
and did, and lo, this fruit! No thinking, no 
peaches. "Yes," you interrupt, "but what of 
frost, wind, hail, blight, and borer?" I reply: 
There is no peach but thinking makes it so, and 
the more you ponder this, the better judge of 
peaches you will become. Climate makes the 
peach possible, if only some one thinks peaches. 
For the peach is as much man-made as a piano. 
There are no Steinways at the North Pole; the 
climate is unfavorable; nor peaches, nor people, 
for that matter. The law of peaches is climate 
and man. He thinks out the peach, the cherry, 
the grape, the apple; no thinking, no fruit; only 
the seeds of the wild, which are not our fruit. 

Thus in fruit-farming man is a creator, and 
creation, procreation, is health. Iron and steel 
and stones cannot think; "as dumb as a rock" 
has much significance. Stones neither grow old nor 
sicken; they exist. But man must do more than 
exist, — he must think and act; and because the 
fruit-farm offers him opportunity, it makes for 
health. Every profession exalts itself; and every 
fruit-farm is the best farm, so says its owner. 
His ideals may be ahead of his deeds. 

A man is a creature of parts, wonderfully made 
and assembled, and wherever these parts function 
best there he should live, — if health is his purpose. 
Theoretically health is every man's objective; 
practically, it is only a possible objective for many. 



Selecting the Farm 61 

Most men sell their lives at so much a day, from 
two coppers in China to thousands of dollars in 
Europe and America. The love of money — what- 
ever that signifies — makes the bargain. It is idle 
to expostulate. The habit is fixed with the race. 
The greater the risk, sometimes the lower the pay. 
Only a few people think they can afford to be 
healthy, just as few can afford to live economically. 
To these few a word is sufficient, for none are so 
deaf as those who will not hear; none so pitiable as 
those who hear and are prisoners of their deafness. 
What is the objective? Health? Wealth? 
Pleasure? Knowledge? Length of years? Fame? 
Leisure? Service? Drifting? The Unknown? 
Really this is the question, come to it as we may, 
whether by way of the factory or the fruit-farm. 
I suspect that the question has long been an- 
swered: "Length of years, riches, honor." Now 
riches and honor are relative, but length of years 
is absolute. There is a cycle of life for every plant 
and animal, according to its kind. Robins live 
say fifteen years; turtles five hundred. It is the 
way of turtles and robins. And how long shall a 
man live ? "A day, and yet forever, ' ' answers one ; 
1 ' fourscore and no more, ' ' replies another. Schools 
of thinking differ here also. But we are speaking 
of this earth, not of some other universe. "Oh!" 
replies the young doctor; "in that case, barring 
accident, as long as his arteries keep elastic." 
There you are. "Know thy arteries," Socrates 
should have said. 



62 An American Fruit-Farm 

"I am looking for a climate," is the invalid 
traveler's constant plaint; he means, of course, 
that he is looking for elastic arteries. They are 
health. Being now definite, we can test our habi- 
tat, our fruit valley — wherever it lies — for arteries, 
just as physicians take the pressure of the blood. 
For blood-pressure is symptomatic. So too are 
vocations, as any one may know by perusing the 
reports of life-insurance companies. "Occupation, 
fruit-growing"; "cashier in a bank"; the company 
figures nicely on the risk and takes the man who 
is likely to pay premiums the longer time — judging 
by his arteries. Life insurance is common among 
bank clerks; uncommon among fruit-growers, for 
they prefer, like some steamship companies, to 
carry their own risks. He has the farm as insur- 
ance; the clerk has his month's salary. The 
fruit-grower has earth and the open; the clerk has 
the park and the street, the office, bank holidays, 
and two weeks in August for Atlantic City, or 
the Canadian woods. The fruit-grower has the 
security of his land; the clerk, the secret of his 
earning power — which is his health — and this he 
is insuring. The fruit-grower falls back upon his 
fruit-farm; the clerk upon his insurance policy. 
But the insurance policy means annual premiums 
to the company; the fruit-farm, annual fruit to 
the farmer. A few years after I began fruit-farm- 
ing, I took out an endowment policy in a great 
mutual company. I was examined duly by the 
company's physician and pronounced a good risk. 



Selecting the Farm 63 

For twenty years I punctually paid the premiums. 
The day of maturity came, and, after pondering 
over the "choices" for settlement, I made mine, 
by the terms of the policy and the written agree- 
ment of the company, signed by its agent. When 
the day of settlement came, the company repudi- 
ated the act of its agent, made out its own figures, 
stated briefly that so it would settle, and "begged 
to hear from me . " My vision of twenty years faded . 
Three thousand dollars went with that dream. 
I expostulated. The company explained that 
rates of interest had fallen in twenty years and 
earnings had not been so large as were expected. 
But now it was issuing a new, a different kind of a 
policy to the old line endowment. Would I not 
be examined by the company's physician and take 
out another policy? I could make a better invest- 
ment under the new plan. My curiosity was 
aroused. I took the examination and was 
congratulated on my arterial pressure which 
(the company's physician said) indicated a 
man twenty years younger. I settled with 
the company and thought pleasantly on my 
arteries. Meanwhile my fruit-farm had been 
in the making; this explained the arterial pres- 
sure. Instead of taking out another policy — on 
the new and improved model — I bought more 
fruit-farm, not wholly unmindful of arteries. 
But I will be just. T do not overrate the fruit- 
farm nor underrate the insurance company; 
I think on my arteries. It was the fruit-farm 



64 An American Fruit-Farm 

which kept the arteries elastic, not the insurance 
company. 

One of the annual premiums of the fruit-farm 
is health; usually, with insurance companies one 
must die to win, and lose in order to collect. 
Meanwhile life has its pleasures in the fruit 
valley. 

It would be unfair to any fruit valley to repre- 
sent it as free from sickness and disease; it too has 
doctors, and patients by the thousand. Indeed, 
in the fruit valley, sooner or later everybody sends 
for the doctor. Yet I have never heard that sick- 
ness there is due to fruit-farming. Health is the 
rule. But this, you say, is generally true in 
America. There are vocational diseases which 
must be reckoned with, like phosphoric poisoning 
in the making of parlor matches (of a certain kind) ; 
lead-fumes in the manufacture of paint; gout 
among heavy capitalists, and lung troubles among 
mill hands. When appendicitis was discovered 
by the public, some twenty-five years since, it 
was promptly attributed to grape seeds, yet though 
the Valley is a vast vineyard, appendicitis is not 
epidemic in ' ' grape time. ' ' And it may be asserted 
confidently, that no case of appendicitis can be 
attributed to the seed of any fruit. Cherries and 
milk are fatal, yet though the Valley raises thou- 
sands of bushels of cherries and milkmen abound, 
no cases are reported. Some say that the milk is 
too well watered to be fertile of cherry indigestion, 
and, moreover, that cherries sell so well in New 



Selecting the Farm 65 

York and Pittsburgh and Chicago that the 
pickers cannot afford to eat them. The elevation 
above the sea — five hundred and seventy-three 
feet at the lake and thirteen hundred and more 
feet along the crest of the Valley — is too high and 
the winds too dry for lung troubles. But the 
water from the limestone in the Devonian Hills 
at the south is so hard on the human frame that 
when pickers tumble, without notice, from cherry 
trees, they may crack their bones; although some 
pickers use water only as a wash. Because of this, 
their aversion, other liquids are consumed, as in 
other valleys in America. This is one of the perils 
of fruit-farming. Despite these drawbacks, the 
health of the inhabitants is reflected by thousands 
of acres of fruitful orchard and vineyard. These 
are the fruit-growers root and branch. Not 
every fruit-farm betokens a healthy master. 
Farms get down at the heels and lose hope, and 
so merely hold the world together. The healthy 
fruit-plantation means a healthy owner. Valleys 
and plains the world over illustrate this truth. 

But here, in the beautiful Valley, men are think- 
ing and doing, and so are healthy. Some might 
think harder and do more; some year after year 
think and do less. So there are stationary fruit- 
farms, like bowlders, left by the retreating ice of 
the Glacial Period, ages ago, — mere monuments of 
former progress. It is no art to find the complexion 
of the owner's mind in the appearance of his vine- 
yard. The Valley is a good place in which to study 



66 An American Fruit-Farm 

what may be called vegetable psychology — not 
merely to tell how long it takes a man of 32 years, 
5 months, 7 days, 2 hours, 13 minutes, and 3f sec- 
onds, at high noon, to think, but also how long he 
has been thinking and when he ceased to think. 
For as a man thinks so is he and his fruit-farm. 
Years ago, in the days of pioneering it was oats 
and barley, buckwheat and potatoes, rye and wheat, 
corn cattle, sheep and horses; but the thinking of 
the Valley no longer takes these antiquated forms ; 
it is peaches, cherries, grapes, prunes, strawberries, 
raspberries, currants, plums, gooseberries, apples, 
melons, some corn, a little wheat, less oats, a few 
potatoes, and a somewhat neglected vegetable 
garden. Fashions change in thinking and so in 
farming. Our grandfathers thought in terms of 
ox-teams; we, of automobiles. We are warned 
not to put our trust in the legs of a horse and we 
are rapidly learning not to put it in the brake of an 
automobile. Sufficient unto the day is the evil 
thereof. As many fruit-growers now have autos, 
some new perils are added to the ancient list. It 
may be possible to run a machine and keep in good 
health, but not all autoists have as yet learned 
the secret. Some manage to keep in fair health 
without machines. Whence the conclusion that 
autos are not necessary to health, or even to 
fruit-farming. Yet, as an automobile gives its 
owner much to think about, and, as it ages, keeps 
him increasingly busy, and as thinking and doing 
are conducive to health, owners and users of 



Selecting the Farm 67 

machines should be by right husky men, well 
conditioned for length of years. 

The coming of the machine has made the entire 
Valley — like other valleys — an accessible neigh- 
borhood and has shortened its length from fifty 
miles to sixty minutes. And if the owner turns 
turtle, he may report by telephone at the first 
farmhouse. So a stroke of invention has made 
neighbors of us all. This too makes for health. 
No longer the sickness that comes from isolation; 
no more the bad fruit-farming that comes from 
not knowing what your thoughtful neighbor is 
doing. So the Valley is improving, if by no more 
than by active imitation. The tradition that 
farming is health is thus borne out. The weaklings 
sell out and emigrate, and the fittest survive. For 
more than half a century now the process of natural 
selection has been active in the Valley, and to-day 
the survivors themselves are passing through the 
winnowing process. Clearly the Valley illustrates 
the effect of domestication on man. Possibly the 
process has been hurried a little with land at from 
four hundred dollars to one thousand dollars an 
acre; but at a thousand an acre some land in 
the Valley is cheap; and at one dollar an acre 
other land within it is expensive. It depends 
upon climate and the man, rather than upon the 
land. The man depends upon his health. Thus 
again we come to the man, and this means, when 
reduced to lowest terms, to the state of his health. 
Invalidism may possibly be an avocation but never 



68 An American Fruit-Farm 

a vocation. A fruit-farm is not a sanitarium, 
though sometimes put to such a use. 

Back to the earth and the open, actively induced 
by interest in the vocation of fruit-raising, a man, 
not too old to get well, may regain health. But to 
use a farm as a medicine, "one drop in a pail of 
water," is merely a change of doctors. Even the 
rival schools of medicine do not pretend to change 
the pharmacopoeia. Cherry trees sometimes grow 
elastic arteries; so too, ranching, or hoeing corn 
or taking the grand tour by Karnak, Egypt, and 
the Holy Land; for only healthy people survive 
Jerusalem. No one comes to the fruit-farm too 
young, but it is easy to come too old. Happy the 
man who inherits not merely acres but the love 
of cultivating them. 

The true fruit-man would rather raise fruit 
than eat it, which is not an instance either of 
commercialism or surfeit, — only of a pleasant part- 
nership with Nature. Every sane man yearns to be 
a creator. Man is the maker as he is the thinker, 
and his cherries are never finer than his thoughts. 
He who has not experienced the joys of growing 
things knows no more than the pleasure of seeing 
fruit for sale in the market. First the leaf, then 
the bud, then the fruit, — but always the man. 
The sacred books record that the Creator was 
pleased with His handiwork, and in this men re- 
semble their Creator. The poet is poet because 
he is a maker, and we call him of low degree still 
a versifier, or maker of verse. It is then a divine 



Selecting the Farm 69 

touch that makes kinsmen of us all — the love of 
creating, be it a railroad, a watch, or a fruit-farm. 
Here is the secret of health, — to create, to enjoy 
the creation. The personal equation must be 
figured out by every man. Some men, at ninety, 
can run a railroad, but the usual age for retiring 
is not far from sixty. "The machine," after that, 
as Hamlet would say, "is no longer to him." The 
wheels creak and the grist runs low. The railroad 
president finds pleasure in the system he has built 
up ; the fruit-grower, in the plantation he has made. 
And many fruit-farmers are worn out at sixty and 
fail to reach ninety. It is the man, not the railroad 
or the farm. 

Innumerable are the books which tell us how to 
be strong and stay so; how to be well and happy. 
In a drug store, as one glances about and reads 
the labels on the bottles and the signed testi- 
monials, he may well wonder not why any should 
die, but why any take the trouble to be sick. Or he 
may have a more painful thought: how take all 
these potions and live. Yet we live and we die 
despite the apothecary, despite the fruit-farms. 
Doctors, in their puzzled moments, are likely to 
send the patient off on his travels. It is an open 
secret that the good doctor's purpose is to get the 
patient thinking about something else than him- 
self. Fruit-farming is this resource; the farmer 
always has something to think about and to think 
hard. His thousands of vines and hundreds of 
trees keep him busy. Wind and storm, frost, 



70 An American Fruit- Farm 

snow, hail, sleet, lightning, insects, fungi, changing 
fashions for fruits, prices, the market, and all the 
certain uncertainties of the entire fruit vocation 
furnish a complete encyclopaedia of diverse pro- 
vocation of much thinking. The fruit-grower has 
plenty to do, plenty to eat, and plenty to think 
about, — which is the very tripod of health and 
sane living. He therefore should be a healthy 
man, having all these things and living on the 
earth and in the open. 



Ill 



THE PLANTING OF THE FRUIT-FARM 

WHETHER in the wild or under cultivation, 
climate determines the survival, and there- 
fore the selection, of varieties. Soil merely holds 
what climate permits to grow. Exposure, slope, 
wind-ways, moisture, are details of climate. A 
multitude of varieties means the multiplication of 
weak stock; survivals are known as standard varie- 
ties, vigorous, and, with ordinary care, producing 
fruit. A variety, unadapted to a locality, struggles 
for existence and becomes a mere shade-tree. Cato, 
in one of his ' Fragments, ' ' says : ' ' Trees that bear 
fruit are happy ; those which do not bear, unhappy. " 
Perhaps this means varieties adapted to location. 
Planted in deep, rich soil, the standard variety fruits 
productively, or, as the old Roman would say, 
"happily. " A hillside may be, and usually is, wet 
and springy; even a slope may lack under-drainage. 
In setting the fruit-plantation, one must consider 
drainage, exposure, direction of prevailing winds, 
nearness of woods and forest as windbreaks, open 
spaces of lake, river, or valley, and the habit of 
the plant, be it tree, shrub, bush, or vine. 

71 



72 An American Fruit-Farm 

Most men are in a hurry to get the fruit-farm 
into profitable bearing, and are tempted to select 
for planting stock that is too old. Small young 
stock is best : grape roots one year from the cutting ; 
trees one year, in some varieties two years, from 
the bud. The shock of replanting is always great, 
— much greater than we realize; therefore plant 
young, vigorous roots. Vitality is the main thing. 
Bruised roots and rootlets are gateways to disease; 
therefore make a clean cut with a sharp knife, 
leaving the end of the root, or the end of the 
branch or twig smooth. It rapidly heals over, in 
health, unless the wound be a laceration, big 
and rough. Many trim the top but ignore the 
bruised and broken roots. In handling stock 
from the nursery, keep it covered, especially 
the roots, from sun and wind. Either will dry out 
and kill the rootlets, and these are the mouths 
and stomachs of the tree below ground, — the 
counterparts of leaf and twig in air. Trim 
after the tree or vine is set, when you can see it 
from all sides; otherwise you may have cut off 
the wrong branches. The tree is to be kept ever 
in balance and its poise cannot be known till 
it is properly set. 

As you would first work your corn-field before 
planting corn, so will you first work and lay out 
your land for orchard or vineyard. The careful 
man, in laying out a large tract for orchard or vine- 
yard, may employ a surveyor, for tree rows and 
grape rows; the orchard and vineyard sections 



The Planting of the Fruit- Farm 73 

will stand for generations and cannot be changed. 
Straight rows look best and economize labor. 
Trees must be in line in whatever direction the eye 
follows them, and an orchard must be cultivated, 
at times diagonally as well as at right angles. The 
tree must be set with respect to its habit. This 
slender stem you plant will become a canopy of 
foliage and fruit, upraised on a stately trunk. 
You must see the full-grown orchard in its infancy. 
So the orchardist must grant ample space of earth 
and air, for roots below and foliage above are 
counterparts, — the two halves of the living thing 
you plant. In fruit-raising, we cut back the top 
and encourage spread of root in order to secure 
concentration of vigor in fruit and foliage. We 
must know that a rich soil means a rapidly growing, 
large, healthy tree; a thin, poor soil means a weak- 
ling. Therefore in planting an orchard we must 
consider the soil. I give two distances, — the 
greater for the richer soil: 



Apples 25 to 40 feet each way 
Pears (standard) 20 " 25 " 

Pears (dwarf) 12 " 18 " 

Quinces 16 " 

Peaches 16 " 24 " 

Plums 18 " 24 " 

Cherries 18 " 20 " 

Blackberries 6 by 4 feet 

Raspberries 6 " 3 " 

Currants 6 " 4 " 

Gooseberries 6 " 4 " 



74 An American Fruit-Farm 

Strawberries i foot apart in the row; the rows 

apart for cultivation with a horse, — 
say 3 feet at least. 

Grapes 8 feet apart in the row; the rows 

9 feet apart, so as to admit modern, 
two-horse tools, sprayer, grape 
wagon, etc. 

The essential problem in planting is twofold: 
to secure feeding and breathing space for the tree 
and ample room for cultivation with horses and 
modern tools. An apple tree will grow fifty feet 
high, but fruit at that height is out of reach. So 
too a cherry tree, a plum or prune or peach, will 
grow too high for practical use. Any tree which 
must be picked with use of a painter's ladder 
instead of an ordinary, commercial, picking ladder, 
costs more than it is worth. A fruit-tree must 
be kept low, and therefore out-spreading. This 
means ample space and wide planting. No man 
ever regrets giving his trees sufficient space in 
which to fruit low. Ground fruit, such as berries 
and all vegetables, must be planted according to 
the care they are to receive. In Germany, and in 
Europe generally, all labor in the field is by hand, 
and therefore the space between rows is narrow, — 
usually little more than the width of the hoe for 
vegetables. In America hand labor is unusual, — 
is too costly. All work is done with a horse, or, 
on most farms, with a team. Twenty years ago 
tools, such as cultivators, drags, plows, and spray- 
ing-machines (if any) , were small, light, and narrow, 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 75 

rarely having a spread of over six feet. To-day 
the spread is nine feet and two horses must be used. 
A fruit-farm, in order to be both scientific and 
practical, must nowadays be run on a generous 
scale. The fruit-garden may be run by hand; 
the fruit-farm must be run by horse power. Yet 
if the ground fruits — berries, tubers, and the like — 
be planted closely and in narrow rows, and the 
ground be kept rich and thoroughly worked, — 
intensive cultivation, — the grower will get far 
more from his land than does the fruit-farmer who 
runs his farm by horse power, acre for acre. One 
need but compare production in Germany with 
that in America, on equal areas, to discover this. 
But in America we have not cheap farm labor. 
We are compelled to rely on teams and tools and 
a few hands to run them. 

In planting, keep the roots from bruising; cut 
injured parts clean away to escape root and branch 
diseases. Avoid bruising the bark, the limbs, the 
twigs. Cover bruised parts with a coating of 
pitch, paint, or formaldehyde to keep out air and 
water and germs, and the numberless spores of 
fungi floating in the air and quick to take lodging 
in the wounded plant. Even a coat of painter's 
oil is a protection. In time the tree will heal the 
wound, if possible. For a few years a young tree 
or vine will flourish, then suddenly show signs of 
disease and die before your eyes. The spores of 
fungi got in their deadly work where you left a 
wound of bruised bark or mangled root. Your 



76 An American Fruit-Farm 

years of labor and waiting are wasted. Tree- 
planting is largely a problem of securing breathing 
space in earth and air. Most growers sooner or 
later regret that they had not planted farther apart, 
giving ampler space for growth. The condition of 
the plant, at any time in its later history, will be 
determined by space as well as by cultivation. It 
is yours to trim, to fertilize, to cultivate; the tree 
has only to grow. Thus soil fertility and control 
of the plant are your problem. Your supreme 
purpose is to concentrate the strength of the soil 
upon the plant. The whole life of the plant must 
be active in production of fruit : this is the supreme 
function of tree, vine, bush, or shrub. 

It is an easy labor to set out trees and seemingly 
to plant an orchard. Land may be plowed, har- 
rowed, marked, and so, on the surface, be made 
ready for the young trees. But trees root deep, — 
indeed, produce as much area of feeding surface 
in roots as of feeding surface in branch, twig, and 
leaf. No fruit-tree grown in North America will 
nourish in water or in dry earth ; nor will it flourish 
in soil which passes from water-soaked to ashen- 
dry condition. Extremes kill the tree. In plant- 
ing an orchard, the most important question is of 
drainage. Happily, most cultivable land so slopes 
as to be, as it is said, self -draining ; which means 
that the subsoil, even the surface, is neither 
water-clogged, nor as dry as parchment. Water, 
in form of moisture, is ever circulating through a 
well-drained soil. The earth acts much like a 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 77 

lamp wick, and ever exhibits the process of capil- 
lary action. This action prevented, the soil 
becomes fatal to the root of vine or tree; the soil 
becomes water-soaked, or parched. 

But many a field otherwise adapted to orchard 
culture is not adequately drained. Its geological 
structure may prevent such effective drainage as 
is desired ; the layers of the soil ; the strata of the 
rocks, or even the slight undulation of the surface 
may have the effect of a series of dams, holding 
back the water, and so soaking and clogging the 
soil. The only remedy is drainage, which is of 
two kinds, — by a ditch, whether open or covered, 
leading to stream or lake, or by drainage wells, fed 
by such a ditch. The simple problem is to prevent 
standing water. If the land is saucer-shaped, as 
to surface, and bottomed by hardpan, water will 
stand within the hollow as in a metal basin. Either 
cut a ditch across the edge of the basin, letting the 
water escape into stream or lake ; or sink a drain- 
age well, piercing the hardpan, thus letting the 
water sink through a porous bottom and thus 
vanish. But dig the drainage well, not in the 
middle of the low spot, lest it fill and remain full; 
for the sediment will tend to choke the gravel bot- 
tom to which the well was dug. Sink the well in 
gravel soil at the edge of the low spot, even many 
rods from its center, and having by accurate level- 
ing ascertained the necessary drop to carry off the 
water, dig the ditch from the center of the low spot 
to the well, through gravel, if possible, for the water, 



78 An American Fruit-Farm 

passing through the tile at bottom of the ditch, will 
sink into the gravel all along the length of the ditch, 
and ordinarily fail to reach the well. Cover the 
ditch with care, and care consists, in laying the tile, 
say four- or six-inch as may be needed according 
to the amount of water to be carried away ; the tile 
lying end to end, in foot lengths, the joints open, 
and protected by small flat stones, set like the 
peak of a roof, over the joint. Fill the ditch, 
covering the tile, to a depth of a foot or more with 
loose stone, — small round-heads picked up from 
the farm. This stone covering acts as a drain and 
filter. If the soil through which the ditch is dug 
is hard clay, or close loam, it is well to cover the 
loose stone with strips of burlap, — old phosphate 
bags, which will keep the superincumbent earth 
back from washing into the spaces between the 
stones, till the earth has hardened, or "settled." 
This simple protection secures a practically open 
run-way for the water at bottom of the ditch, to a 
height, say of the imposed stones. At the entrance 
to the ditch, near the center of the low spot, cover 
the stone — laid atop the tile — with coarse gravel, 
say for a rod. This makes sure the easy entrance 
of the surface water as it accumulates after a heavy 
downpour. The drainage well itself is dug to a 
depth which gives coarse gravel as a bottom, to an 
indefinite depth. The well, walled up with loose 
stone, like an ordinary water -well, should be four 
or five feet in the clear, and may be arched over at 
the top; or covered with large flat stones, or with 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 79 

a cover made of cement and cast in a wooden frame. 
The well may be covered so that the plow cannot 
strike this arch or cement. Of course the careful 
fruit-grower keeps a plot of his land and locates on 
it all ditches and drains. 

Better than the ditch and the drainage well is it 
to spend a few days, before setting out the orchard, 
with team, plow, and shovel, and a crew of men in 
leveling the proposed orchard field. Fill up the 
hollows; cut down the hillocks; you will save 
greater cost in drainage wells and ditches and dead 
trees. It takes a dozen years to produce a tree 
in full bearing, and well-drained land need know 
slight if any loss of trees because of either water- 
soaked or parched land. 

Once the subsoil is drained, the tree knows no 
serious hindrance to rooting. Extremes of flood 
and drouth are prevented. And if the tree thence- 
forth is adequately cared for, — by trimming, spray- 
ing, cultivating, soil-fertility, and wind and weather, 
the fruit-grower may reasonably expect his reward. 
Drainage at bottom and cultivating at surface 
are only parts of the care of an orchard. The 
simple but inexorable rule, not to set a tree after 
it starts to grow, — in the spring, or before it ceases 
to grow, in the fall, — and a second and like rule, 
never, to plant an orchard on undrained land, may 
be accepted as the orchardist's chief guide. There- 
fore it is well, if trees are to be set in the spring, to 
get the land ready the fall before ; or, if to be set 
in the fall — an admirable time for most trees, — to 



80 An American Fruit-Farm 

get the land ready during the summer, say in 
August, when the water is low, and ditches and 
wells may be dug most cheaply and effectively. 

Subsoiling is a process of draining: the sub- 
soil plow following in the furrow of the ordinary 
plow, breaking through the hard earth to a depth 
of several inches, making it porous, ventilating it, 
and enabling plant roots easily to find their way 
through it. Land which is thus locked at bottom 
and impervious may well be thus plowed deep be- 
fore trees are set out, but subsoiling is useless as an 
attempted corrective of hardpan. Or if the land 
is a thin, shallow soil resting on strata of rock, sub- 
soiling is equally impossible and valueless. The 
best land for fruit is land naturally well drained: 
land overlying a rocky or hardpan bottom at a 
depth of from eight to twenty feet. The imper- 
vious bottom aids in retaining plant-food in the 
soil. Soil which is sandy or gravelly to a great 
depth is expensive to keep fertile, — the food- 
supply ever dissipating; or land which overlies 
hardpan or stratified rock, a few feet below, and 
sloping sharply, is drained too rapidly, — being, in 
fact, a mere cover for a perpetual underground 
stream which carries away fertilizer. It is folly 
to set out an orchard in shallow soil, say of two 
feet depth, or less, for, later in the life of the 
orchard, heavy winds are likely to uproot the 
trees. The roots, in such land, strike down- 
wards till they reach the rock or hardpan, then 
spread laterally but have not sufficient overweight 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 81 

of earth to counterbalance the violence of the 
wind. 

Subsoiling does not always correct the evil of 
an impervious stratum, for the earth soon settles 
back to its primitive condition. After the orchard 
is once planted, subsoiling cannot be done, unless 
possibly in the case of dwarf pears, whose roots 
tend to cluster rather than to spread laterally. 
But to subsoil a grown orchard of apple, cherry, 
peach, or prune would be fatal to thousands of roots 
and doubtless kill the trees. For surface crops, 
as strawberries, grain, truck, and even raspberries, 
subsoiling is often a help. Far better is it to drain 
the land by tiling, as explained above. The su- 
preme purpose of subsoiling and tiling is to give 
a permanent outlet for superfluous water. The 
subsoil is commonly said to contain ingredients 
poisonous to plant-roots, which means that stag- 
nant water kills the kind of vegetation attempted 
by the fruit-grower. It cannot be too well under- 
stood that fruit-stock will not grow in standing 
water, hence the necessity of drainage. The tile- 
drain is worth more than the subsoil plow; both 
may be necessary in preparing the land for the new 
orchard. 

Having marked out the land for orchard or 
vineyard, you dig the holes. Some advocate 
digging with a stick of dynamite, but the thought- 
ful man knows that if land is so hard and rocky 
that a hole in the ground can be made only with 
dynamite, the roots of the tree will be limited by 



82 An American Fruit-Farm 

the loosened earth; they soon strike as it were a 
metal casing and growth ceases. It is precisely 
like attempting to raise trees at Atlantic City. 
There the hole is dug in the salty sand and is filled 
with soil imported from the mainland. The tree 
lives till it has exhausted the imported soil; if 
longer, new soil must be supplied. A like con- 
dition prevails near Chicago. Spread the roots 
carefully with the fingers in the loose earth, at 
bottom of the hole. Let no fertilizer of any kind 
come in contact with the roots. Cover these with 
earth only, and on top of this layer of soil scatter 
the fertilizer, sparingly. I have had best success 
when the hole is filled to within six or eight inches 
of the top with soil, then fill in with well-rotted 
barnyard manure and cover as a mulch. This 
keeps the whole root-mass moist. Do not water 
the tree, and never pour water about the tree 
without afterwards throwing fresh earth on, to 
prevent baking of the soil and closing up its pores. 
This means that plants should not be set when 
the ground at the bottom of the hole is dry as 
powder. There are times amidst an unusually 
dry season, in spring or fall, when plants must 
be set, or planting go over another year. Then 
water may be poured into the hole before the plant 
is set. The soil filled in will act as a mulch. But 
such planting is inadvisable. Again, after plants 
are set, growth may set in. If irrigation is neces- 
sary, wet the ground thoroughly. Moisture for 
roots comes chiefly and naturally from below, not 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 83 

from above. The best irrigation is to keep the 
ground, the surface, constantly stirred. This is 
equivalent to a rainfall and is more beneficial than 
irrigation. If you keep the cultivator running 
through your plantation, you will not need ir- 
rigation. 

All plant-food is soluble, therefore it should reach 
the plant as moisture. In the laboratory of the 
soil the change is from solid to liquid. The thin 
walls of the root-cells absorb moisture, feeding on 
the soluble food as it passes through the cell walls. 
Therefore all fertilizers must dissolve or decay, 
must break down into liquid or gas in order to be- 
come available plant-food. This law must be re- 
cognized when trees and vines are planted. Raw 
fertilizer touching the roots poisons them; but 
a neighboring supply of food for the speedy use of 
the young plant helps it tide over the shock of 
transplantation. I have found it desirable to set 
the young tree deeper than it stood in the nursery. 
As a rule, deep setting means a greater supply of 
food to the root. Grafted trees — pears, cherries, 
prunes, plums, peaches, indeed all trees which 
are grafted or budded at the root (of course, 
apple, or other varieties grafted in the stock, ex- 
cepted) — should be set so that the bud-stock will 
be covered, otherwise the latent buds in the wild 
stock may burst forth into perennial suckers of 
endless annoyance. A grapevine, being a cutting, 
not a graft, gives no like trouble, but should be set 
so that the top bud is quite even with the ground. 



84 An American Fruit-Farm 

There is a notable difference in budded fruit-trees. 
Some are so budded that the growth at the point 
of budding becomes much greater in diameter than 
that below the bud. This means that the budded 
stock grows faster than the original stock on which 
it is budded. The result oftentimes is the bursting 
of the bark above the point of budding, thus letting 
in fungi and insects and disease. The remedy 
is to buy stock of even growth with the original 
root stock, and also to set the tree well below the 
line of budding so that the sun may not scald the 
bark. The best preventive is not to buy stock 
so budded, for after the orchard has stood, say a 
dozen years, the trees, — notably sour cherry trees, 
will suddenly die without notice. 

All plants when set — trees, shrubs, vines — 
should be thoroughly tamped — i. e., the earth 
should be fully and firmly pressed down, as it is 
put over the roots, imbedding the rootlets and 
preventing their drying out. The common method 
of setting strawberry plants is an illustration. 
Usually the farmer chooses a cloudy or even a 
rainy day for setting them. He uses a piece of 
wood, a sort of conical trowel with which he 
first presses out the hole, then, shaking out 
the roots, he holds the plant amidst the hole 
and with the tool presses the soft earth firmly 
about the roots. Many a tree perishes because 
the planter neglected to press the soil firmly 
about the rootlets. 

All fruit-trees and nut-bearing shrubs, except 



The Planting of the Fruit- Farm 85 

apricots, are best planted in the fall. The season 
is convenient for the work and the tree is in order 
for starting growth in the spring. Many orchard- 
ists insist, however, that peaches should be set in 
the spring. It is possibly well enough to plant in 
the spring if you can get your nursery stock early 
enough without risk of being frosted during trans- 
portation. Grapevines, berries, currants, should 
be set in the spring. Climate and location must 
be duly considered. It is presupposed that the 
ground is in order, — a preparation easiest made 
in the fall, or late summer for fall planting. This 
preparation implies the adaptability of the section 
to the immediate purpose. Wet, undrained land 
is not adapted to fruit of any kind. Cherries and 
peaches do best on dry, well drained soil. A stony 
soil is no detriment to the tree but is expensive to 
cultivate. Plums, prunes, and apples will prosper 
in moister land than one may wisely select for 
peaches or cherries. In planting orchard or vine- 
yard, care should be taken to have the sections 
accessible by alley or road, and so to set the rows 
that there shall be little or no waste of time and 
labor in cultivation. Short rows and frequent 
turns are hard on men, team, and tools and run up 
the labor bills. Have the turn at the end of the 
row come in alley or road, and waste no land. 
The farm that abuts on the highway has the 
advantage of economy in use of land and in 
turning the team. Plant land to the limit of 
the line if possible and make the turn in the 



86 An American Fruit-Farm 

roadside. As in Germany, plant fruit-trees along 
the roadside and so get use of the land. In a 
fruit country there is the least disturbance of 
fruit by thieves, for everybody is a watchman. 
Care should be taken to lay out alleys and 
roadways economically, for they cost the use of 
the land, the land itself, and the upkeep of the 
road. 

All berry crops are short-lived: strawberries 
two years; raspberries not more than ten; currants 
and gooseberries somewhat longer. An orchard or 
a vineyard is planted -for an indefinite period. 
Apple trees are long-lived and usually bear profit- 
ably when fifteen years old. Individual trees and 
some varieties begin to bear at seven years from 
planting. Apples on young trees are like a child's 
earnings, small and infrequent, and rather hard on 
the child. The tree thrives best on -well-drained, 
strong land. Our memories are of the old orchard, 
a cool, cavernous, fruitful retreat, the home of birds 
and bees, or waving grasses and fruit-laden boughs, 
of tall ladders too, and the shaking of top branches, 
the rattling of apples through them, over our heads, 
and our scuttling to a safe retreat. The apple 
trees never failed, — for we forget the barren years 
and never knew the waste of finest apples at top 
of the tree that could not be reached even with the 
tallest ladder. The sprig of a tree we plant spans 
no more than the shade of one's hand; the old 
tree we remember seemed to brush the clouds. 
Now we keep the orchard low and let in the sun- 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 87 

light. Only unsuccessful orchardists put out sixty- 
foot apple trees. 1 

Pear trees flourish in moist, rich, well-drained 
soil. They are usually short-lived and subject to 
many diseases. Of these the blight and the scale 
are familiar, making pear culture uncertain and 
unprofitable. Yet the orchardist who can control 
these diseases and raise pears has a profitable crop. 2 

1 The variety of apples as displayed at the annual exhibit of the 
Pomological Section of the Horticultural Society of the State is bewilder- 
ing and each kind seems best. A general consensus of opinion indicates 
that for the States of the North and East, the best early or summer 
apples are Yellow Transparent, Early Harvest, Primate, Early Joe, Red 
Astrachan, Golden Sweet, Oldenburg, Summer Permain, Chenango, 
Bough (sweet), Gravenstein, Jefferis, Porter. 

The best autumn, — Maiden's Blush, Bailey (sweet), Fameuse, Fall 
Pippin, Wealthy, and Mother. 

Winter, — Jonathan, Hubbardson, Grimes's Golden, Tompkins's King, 
Wagener, Baldwin, Yellow Bellflower, Rhode Island Greening, Talman, 
Northern Spy, Red Canada, Roxbury Russet. 

For the South and Southwest: 

Early summer, — Red June, Yellow Transparent, Red Astrachan, 
Summer Queen, Benoni, Oldenburg, Gravenstein. 

Autumn, — Haas, Late Strawberry, Maiden's Blush, Oconee, Rambo, 
Peck's Pleasant, Roman Beauty, Carter's Blue. 

Winter, — Paragon, Shockley, Smith's Cider, Hubbardson, Hoover, 
Horse, Grimes's Golden, Buckingham, Jonathan, Winesap, Kinnaird, 
Ben Davis, York Imperial, Romanite, Rail's Genet, Limber Twig. 

In the Northwest, extremely hardy varieties: 

Early, — Yellow Transparent, Tetofski. 

Autumn, — Oldenburg, Fameuse, Longfield, Wealthy, McMahan. 

Winter, — Wolf River, Hibernal, Northwestern Greening, Pewaukee, 
Switzer, Golden Russet. 

3 Of varieties as early pears, — Clapp, Bloodgood, and Summer Do- 
yenne; as autumn pears, — Bartlett, Boussock, Flemish Beauty, Buffum, 
Howell, Seckel, Louise Bonne, Duchess (d'Angoul^me) ; for winter, — 
Anjou, Sheldon, Clairgeau, Lawrence, Kieffer, Winter Nellis, and East 
Beurre. At the North the Keifer tends to grow small, coarse, and 
stringy, and of poor flavor; it is better at the South. 



88 An American Fruit-Farm 

All diseases to which fruit is subject seem to 
afflict the pear tree. We are not as yet practically 
acquainted with the preventive of blight. The 
usual treatment for scale remedies that evil, but 
for pear blight we as yet can do no more than to 
cut out the affected part, a foot or so below the sign 
of the blight, and burn the cuttings. Leaf blight 
is hindered if not prevented by spraying with 
Bordeaux mixture. The best treatment of the 
pear tree is abundant feeding. Orchardists differ 
in opinion as to cultivation; many, and successful 
raisers of pears, insist that the orchard should be 
left in grass and be freely enriched with plant- 
food, barnyard manure, and with fruit-food — 
potash. The dwarf varieties are more susceptible 
to disease than the large or standard varieties. 

In the old days, land thought to be unfit for 
anything else, especially if wet, yet plowable, was 
set to plums. Yet the tree has its preferences and 
ever for well-drained, strong, rich soil. Plums 
divide into two classes, Domestic and Japanese; 
the latter newcomers which grow rapidly, fruit 
early and abundantly, tend to overbear, and are 
short-lived. This means that they are very sus- 
ceptible to disease. The Japanese varieties blos- 
som and set their fruit early and therefore are 
somewhat uncertain at the North. If raised there 
they should be planted on late ground that slopes 
to the north and where May does not come in 
March, or March in May. The variety of plums 
is somewhat bewildering, and whatever the or- 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 89 

chardist plants he will sooner or later doubtless 
wish that he had planted some other variety. 
Plums seem to be the favorite fruit for experimenta- 
tion by the nurserymen. New varieties crowd 
upon us each year. The orchardist who raises 
plums for profit desires size, color, flavor, prolific- 
ness, and good shipping qualities. This may be 
truly said of the desirable in any kind of fruit. 
But a plum tree must always grow very near the 
market house; the fruit will not bear handling. 
By the time it is fit to eat it is too ripe to stand 
transportation. If shipped green, it suggests per- 
simmons in July. Yet, conditions being favorable, 
plums are worth raising. If kept trimmed low — 
and the plum tree is a very vigorous grower — an 
acre of plums, say one hundred and fifty trees, of 
standard variety, but not a mixture of many 
varieties, will, when in full bearing — that is, when 
the orchard is fifteen years old — yield from fifty to 
seventy-five nine-pound baskets to the tree and 
give a gross return of from three hundred and fifty 
to five hundred dollars. The essentials for profit 
are large, well-colored, firm fruit of fine flavor, and 
a good market which may be reached, say within 
twelve hours. 1 

Of higher value than the plum is the prune, 
which seems to be only a hardy, late plum. One 

x The varieties are legion, but by general consent, based on experience, 
the best domestic plums are Bradshaw, Lombard, Imperial Gage, 
Jefferson, Fellenberg, Shropshire, Monarch, Coe Golden Drop, Green 
Gage, and Grand Duke. Of Japanese varieties, — Burbank, Abundance, 
Red June, Satsuma. 



90 An American Fruit-Farm 

cannot easily distinguish a plum tree from a 
prune tree, but experience soon discovers the su- 
perior value of the prune. It is hardier, more 
productive, longer-lived, and more regular in bear- 
ing. Of prunes three desirable varieties are York 
State, German, and Italian, the first possibly a 
local "sport" or seedling, the tree strongly resem- 
bling wild stock. Maturing in late September, or 
mid-October, the prune is firm, large, rich in color 
and quality, and able to bear shipment to long 
distance. Some orchardists report an income of 
from five hundred to eight hundred dollars an acre 
from their prunes. The enemies of plum and prune 
multiply every year. Black-knot is most formid- 
able and is cured by cutting out and burning the 
affected parts, even if the whole tree must go. 
The trees must be sprayed for scale, for fungus, and 
for other insects than the scale, — moths, curculio, 
and the like. Both plums and prunes tend to 
overbear and thus produce a mass of small fruit. 
The preventive is thinning out the fruit early in 
the season, rather than to let the limbs crash down 
under weight of superfluous fruit, or to rely wholly 
upon trimming. The orchardist who has many 
plum or prune trees must plan to give them cease- 
less attention. They are highly profitable when 
rightly managed. Every fruit-farm needs fruit 
in its succession from opening summer till closing 
winter. By consulting the catalogue of a trust- 
worthy nurseryman, the fruit-farmer may select 
a few plum trees as it were "for table use." The 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 91 

Japanese Abundance ripens in the Lake Shore 
Valley about the first of August, and by careful 
selection of varieties the farmer may have plums 
from this time till snow flies. He may well re- 
member that one plum tree, well cared for, pro- 
duces many plums. He may plant several varieties 
in order to have succession of fruit, but he will not 
plant many trees save of the variety which he 
knows will prove profitable commercially. Other- 
wise he will litter his land with fruit he will not 
know what to do with. He will have too much to 
use or give away and not enough to sell. 

Peaches, next to apples, command the market, 
but no section of our country shows uninterrupted 
health of its peach orchards. The tree has many 
enemies. It is rather long-lived, as many still 
in bearing in the Valley have passed their first 
quarter of a century. During this period many va- 
rieties have come and gone. Weather rather than 
climate seems to determine the fate of the peach 
tree. The climate may be peach but the weather 
may prove "yellows," "scale," "black-knot," 
or some other evil in form of insect or fungus. 
The tree requires a well-drained, light, fairly rich 
soil. It is a rapid grower and needs vigorous 
trimming. Wet, heavy land is not for peaches. 
As one travels over America he will see more 
extinct peach orchards than of any other fruit. 
Varieties are legion and each peach area has its 
favorites of soil and climate, of grower and of con- 
sumer. In peaches as in plums, it is color, size, and 



92 An American Fruit-Farm 

quality that determine the selection of varieties. 
The rich yellow, crimson, pink, free-stone, firm 
juicy peach is always in good demand. Very early 
peaches are usually cling-stones, fair in color but 
rather tasteless, or even bitter. The money -mak- 
ing peach is the late, canning peach. The house- 
wife never cans the early peach. She waits till the 
fruit shall be cheaper and suddenly discovers that 
the season is quite past and she has not yet put up 
her peaches. This makes a market for the later 
and, one may say, better varieties. 1 

In planting peaches one must observe the same 
caution as in planting plums, — one, two, possibly 
three standard varieties for commercial profit, — 
say Dewey, Elberta, or Crawford, but never a 
mere mixture of varieties. An acre of peaches, or 
many acres, can be most effectively cared for if 
of one kind. The labor bill compels this economy. 
It is best to harvest a thousand bushels at one time 
than one bushel a thousand different times. There 
is money in peaches but not always in peach or- 
chards. In the peach belt anyone can raise peaches 
if he can raise peach trees, successfully warding off 
yellows, curl-leaf, borer, brown rot, scale, root-gall, 
and the new diseases the summer may bring forth. 
The first question is whether your land lies within 

1 One may prudently consult successful peach-growers as to varieties. 
The Crawford, early and late; Hale's Early, Alexander, Elberta, 
Oldmixon, Stump the World, Gold Drop, Smock, Early Rivers, Cham- 
pion, Belle of Georgia, Captain Ede, Fitzgerald, Admiral Dewey, Foster, 
Morris White, Wheat, and Mountain Rose are standard varieties. A 
peach calendar may be made out, like the plum, so that the household 
may have peaches from mid- July until snow flies. 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 93 

the peach belt; whether you are under the true 
peach sky. If so, plant peach trees. Every or- 
chardist in every peach belt in the country is 
confronted by the same question. While you are 
waiting, another is reaping from two hundred to 
six hundred dollars an acre from his peach orchards. 

A cherry tree, like any other fruit tree will live, 
even flourish as a shade tree, where it will not 
bring forth fruit. But there are more desirable 
trees for shade than are cherry trees. The cherry 
likes a well-drained soil, not too dry or heavy. 
Like peach or plum it grows rapidly, and like all 
fruit-trees perishes quickly in standing water, 
either above or below ground. Like other fruit- 
trees it makes its annual growth while the fruit is 
growing. If left to itself, leaf and fruit will mature 
together, the fruit clinging the longer. Here is 
the clue to feeding the tree, — both for fruit and 
for foliage. 

Sour cherries or sweet? Which shall you plant? 
The sour are more regular in bearing; the sweet 
carry the higher price but are less hardy. Thus 
it may be said that while an orchard of sour cherries 
bears every year, it bears heavily on alternate 
years. Cherry trees, specially of sweet varieties, 
are long-lived, long-jointed, brittle, coarse growing, 
and susceptible to injury from wind, snow, and 
ice-storms ; often break down badly in early spring 
when the sap is starting, and are quite likely to 
break, when winds are strong, under weight of 
leaf and fruit. To escape such injuries the tree 



94 An American Fruit- Farm 

must be headed low, and, if possible, the whole 
orchard should be sheltered by wind-breaks, by 
woods, or by the lay of the land. Of sweet cherries 
the standard are Napoleon, Elton, Black Tartarian, 
Oxheart, Windsor, Rockport, Yellow Spanish; of 
sour cherries, the Early Richmond, Montmorenci, 
May Duke, Reine Hortense, Kentish, and Morello. 1 
Early Richmond ripens first, Morello last, with 
an interval of a month, in some seasons, between 
first and last picking. Of sour cherries the Mont- 
morenci is best, both for tree and for fruit. The 
tree is compact and a prolific bearer ; the Richmond 
is a sprawling tree, weaving about in the wind and 
less prolific. The old-fashioned cherry tree by the 
kitchen door peeped over the roof and its best fruit 
was picked from the shingles on the tip-top 
branches. We are learning to head our cherry 
orchards low so that much of the fruit may be 
gathered while the picker stands on the ground, 
and the remainder from short ladders made for the 
purpose. 

The care of sweet cherries and of sour is not quite 
the same. The trees have unlike habits and must 
be trimmed differently. Just how this trimming 
shall be made is also a matter of opinion. Some 
orchardists, highly successful with cherries, trim 
the sweet varieties vigorously, opening up the 
center of the tree to the sun, and cutting back 
boldly. Sour cherries do not readily bear such 

1 Cherries are budded in the nursery on Mazard, or on Mahaleb root- 
stalk. Opinions vary as to relative value of these root-stalks. 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 95 

trimming and are more subject to sun-scald. But 
either tree should be trimmed with a knife rather 
than with saw or ax, and the orchardist's chief 
study should be to keep the tree low, well balanced, 
and free from trimming scars. Doubtless the best 
rule is, "Do as little trimming as possible." 

The quince thrives in a rich, deep, moist, well- 
drained soil. Of late years it has become rare in 
some fruit valleys, having been quite eliminated 
by insects and fungi. The fruit is never in great 
demand. Some think that the disappearance of 
forests, woods, and wind-breaks, as well as the 
invasion of fungi and insects, accounts for the dis- 
appearance of the quince. The tree at best is an 
uncertain bearer and never very prolific. The 
orange quince remains a standard variety. But 
the orchardist, like the public at large, seems to 
have lost the taste for quinces. Ashes are excel- 
lent fertilizer for the tree, — unleached wood ashes. 
Trimming consists largely in removing dead and 
dying wood. The tree cannot be kept shapely 
like a cherry or a peach tree. 

Grapevines, but not grapes, will grow almost 
anywhere in America. The extremes are vines as 
foliage plants and vines that fruit in fine quality 
and great quantity. This means that the grape 
areas of America, as elsewhere in the world, are 
sharply defined by climate. Here the law is 
"each after its kind." In rather a loose way, 
grapes may be described as raisin grapes and others, 
— that is, grapes that will dry and cure and grapes 



96 An American Fruit-Farm 

that will not dry. The former are known the world 
over as "layers." The non-raisin grape is of the 
temperate zone; the raisin grape is subtropical: 
the division is strictly climatic. In America the 
raisin grape area is in California; the table grape 
areas are numerous and widely scattered. One 
of the noted areas is the Lake Shore Valley, which 
includes the celebrated Chautauqua Belt, of west- 
ern New York. In these days when young men are 
taking up horticulture as a vocation, as other men 
take law, medicine, or engineering, they will do as 
does the young lawyer or engineer, — they will go 
to the place where such business as they wish to 
carry on is done in the best manner and most 
profitably. Thus, as the years pass, the ablest and 
most successful fruit-growers will be found in the 
best fruit regions of the country. The non-raisin 
or table grape — the common wine grape of the 
country — comes to perfection at the northern 
margin of grape cultivation. Here they reach 
perfection of quality and quantity. This law of 
fruitage is common to all vegetable life. Quality 
may determine the commercial value of any fruit. 
This is true of grapes. 

Left to itself the grapevine grows to extraor- 
dinary length, and ever tends to foliage rather than 
to fruit, — whence the vigorous trimming necessary 
in viticulture, for the art of raising grapes consists 
in converting superfluous foliage into superior fruit. 
You may have a hundred feet of vine and here and 
there a scraggly, small bunch of inferior fruit. Cut 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 97 

back the vine; restrain its growth; force it to 
fruit instead of to foliage and you have many large, 
compact bunches of superior fruit. The practical 
problem is to concentrate the vitality of the vine 
into fruit. But this is also the constant problem 
in the orchard; it is the basis of the art of fruit- 
growing. 

The first explorers of the Lake Shore Valley, 
La Salle, La Hontan, Charlevoix, two hundred and 
fifty years ago, took note of the abundance of the 
wild grapevines, along the shore of Lake Erie, run- 
ning to the tallest tree-tops and hung with many 
clusters. The progeny of those vines is vigorous 
in the Valley to this day, — creeping over the rocky 
bluffs of the lake, and hiding the lofty cuts and 
chasms, — locally known as "Hogs' Backs," — 
made by the sixteen streams, — of which La Salle 
makes mention, in the sixteen gulches which 
traverse the ancient Devonian hills walling in the 
Valley along the south. The wild grapevine will 
live anywhere in America except in the arid wastes, 
— the " Great American Desert" mapped out 
in the school-books of our childhood, but which 
has vanished with the "West." It yields to 
cultivation, like other fruit stock from the wild, 
and prospers best in deep, rich, well-drained soil. 
The vine grows in two sections, — one below, one 
above ground, their surface exposure in earth and 
air quite equal. Trimming the upper vine concen- 
trates vitality in the roots and upon the fruit -buds. 
Every vine, capable of fruiting, buds to reproduce 



98 An American Fruit-Farm 

fruit after its kind. Very vigorous vines in a state 
of nature do this. Cultivation consists in modify- 
ing the habits of the vine. It has been said that 
all our varieties spring by cultivation from the wild 
vine. As a general statement this is true, but all 
our varieties do not come from the same wild vine, 
or directly from the wild, — but through domes- 
tication and crossing of varieties themselves. 
Occasionally a seedling appears having marked 
characteristics, and so fixed as to be capable of 
reproducing its kind. Commonly the strong ten- 
dency in the vine is to revert to the wild. The 
wild stock of one region of the earth differs from 
that of another. Transplanting from region to 
region and cross-fertilization produce varieties. 
The Concord grape was a seedling, but the chance 
that a seedling will develop a desirable variety 
is remote. Only a professional experimentalist, — 
a Burbank, — can wisely attempt the problem of 
producing a new variety. The fruit-grower who 
wishes grapevines which will produce each after its 
kind, plants cuttings, not seeds, much as the or- 
chardist sets grafted stock, not seeds of apple, 
peach, or plum. The seed reverts to the wild, save 
so infrequently as to make the rule practicable; 
the cutting and the graft remain true to stock. 

The culture of the grape varies widely in different 
countries and in different parts of the same country. 
In the Lake Shore Valley and the Chautauqua 
Grape Belt, the vines are set in rows, eight feet 
apart in the row, the rows nine feet, though 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 99 

some set them ten, apart. The vine is trained on 
two wires, stretching the length of the row, the 
lower three feet, the upper, six feet from the ground. 
Each wire is drawn taut, is fastened securely to 
the post at the end of the row, and is also fastened 
by staples to stakes at intervals of twenty or 
twenty-four feet apart driven in the row. The 
vine is fastened to the wire with twine — a heavy 
hemp cut to length — or with wire. The hemp is 
cut long enough to tie readily; the wire, fine and 
flexible, is about three inches long. Fifty years 
ago vines were tied with willow, as they still are 
in Germany. The method was brought into the 
Valley by the Germans who came in great numbers 
shortly after the Revolution of 1848. As the 
German skill has died out, and labor has become 
scarcer and more expensive, the use of the willow 
has ceased. The wire is convenient but is liable 
to cut the vine if it sways in the wind. The hemp 
cord has proved a practicable substitute for the 
willow, is easier to handle, and cannot injure the 
vine. 

The end posts are well set and anchored either by 
bringing the upper wire over the post and burying 
in the ground, the extreme end of the wire wrapped 
about a stone, thus bracing the post in front, or 
by placing a brace in the row, behind the post, — 
using a strong stake or a fence rail. The wire 
anchorage system in front of the post is objection- 
able because it interferes with the tools, catches the 
hames, and may be torn out as the team turns the 



ioo An American Fruit-Farm 

row. The grape rows themselves are of the length 
of the section, and usually line up with the several 
rows in the succeeding section. In setting a 
vineyard it is expedient to have long rows and as 
few turns as possible. The weight of the wire 
with vines and fruit is great, often excessive under 
pressure of the wind. Old wires break; new ones 
may pull out staples, and the great weight of wire, 
fruit, and foliage may and often does break down 
the end post. The purpose of the stakes is to 
ease this weight. 

Grapes develop in light, air, and dryness; if 
suffered to lie on the ground they never color or 
ripen. Vines must hang from the wires, not rest 
on the soil. Raisin grapes, as in California or 
Spain, will ripen near, or even on the ground, the 
canes on which they grow springing from a stub, 
or stock to which the vine is trimmed back every 
year. The vine of the Concord type is trimmed 
back to a point about three feet from the ground, 
the stock below as straight as possible. From the 
point where the stock reaches the lower wire the 
vine is trained to two arms extending in opposite 
directions from the point, each arm fastened to 
the lower wire. From each arm two canes are 
suffered to grow to the top wire, all other wood 
being cut away annually. Another system, called 
the umbrella system, trims away all wood along 
the stock to height of the top wire and at that point 
allows the canes to grow and hang down over both 
wires. The objection to the umbrella system is to 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 101 

the ever-lengthening stock, rising above the wires, 
for the stock, as it ages, acquires much loose rough 
bark which easily becomes the refuge for fungi 
and insects. The arm system, which prevails in 
the Lake Shore Valley, keeps the stock low and 
permits new canes each year. This year's grapes 
grow on last year's wood, so that in trimming 
provision must be made for a year ahead. By this 
system the strength of the root is annually concen- 
trated upon the fruitage of buds on the four or more 
canes. These buds, stimulated to growth by trim- 
ming, fertilizing, and cultivation generally, develop 
rapidly into leaf, tendril, stalk, and fruit. The 
trimming of the vine determines the character of 
the vineyard and is doubtless the most important 
part of grape culture. The root stalk, growing 
constantly, tends to become a thick, heavy stump, 
having short stubs sticking out as memorials of the 
poor trimmer. These stubs split and crack at the 
ends, under sun and rain, and give entrance to 
fungi and insects, — fertile culture ground for the 
countless spores ever floating in the air. To avoid 
evil results, the vine should be trimmed close to 
the stock, making a clean cut. Small wounds heal 
over, but large cuts must be covered over with some 
artificial surface that will exclude the spores, — 
say, pitch or paint. The stock below the bottom 
wire becomes ultimately at the top a mass of scars. 
The trimmer allows a sprout to grow from the root 
and to take the place of the old stock, which he 
saws off and burns. By this procedure the vine- 



102 An American Fruit-Farm 

yard may be renewed and kept young. Vines 
may grow crooked stocks which interfere with the 
tools. These may best be supplanted by a new 
shoot. Again, the old vine may have what is 
called the "dead-arm," — that is, so diseased do the 
two arms become because of trimming and spores 
of fungi, they die even down to the ground and 
must be replaced by a new sprout from the root. 

A grapevine naturally tends to fruit at the end, 
of course on last year's wood, so the clusters, in 
successive years, would, if the vine is untrimmed, 
form farther and farther from the root. The 
trimmer cuts back the vine and keeps the fruit 
near the stock, converting the vitality which would 
become length of vine into quantity and quality 
of fruit. Trimming is therefore the yearly regula- 
tion of buds. Experience alone enables the trim- 
mer to know how many and what buds to leave for 
the season. He may suffer the vine to overbear, 
with consequence of little or no fruit the following 
year and a dangerous shock to the vine. The 
entire art of cultivation culminates in the shape, 
form, and fruitful vigor of the vine. 

Of several hundred variety of grapes which will 
fruit in northern vineyards, less than half a dozen 
are of commercial value. In the Lake Shore 
Valley, and generally in the north, the Concord is 
the standard grape ; the unit of measure of prolific- 
ness, vigor, hardiness, regularity in bearing, and of 
quality and quantity of fruit. If it may not be in 
every respect the best known grape, it is the one 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 103 



grape which combines the greater number of desir- 
able qualities sought. It is a climatic grape, like 
every other, and doubtless nourishes at the north- 
ern limit of grape cultivation as can no other 
variety. Again, it may not be adapted to vine- 
yards south of Mason and Dixon's Line, or in the 
California grape area. The practical question in 
any area is, What grape can be grown here, pro- 
fitably, year after year? This means, What grape 
of first quality, will stand the climate, fruit abund- 
antly, bear regularly, and always be in demand? 
Whether for table use, or for wine, the Concord is 
unsurpassed. At the South Shore Wine Cellars 
I was told that from this grape every brand of wine 
known on the market may be made. The Concord 
has never failed in the Lake Shore Valley, — a 
record which cannot be claimed for any other 
grape, any other fruit, or any other plant known 
to the region. It ripens about October first and is 
harvested during that month. It will hang on the 
vine till spring and preserve some hint of its 
quality. There are earlier and later varieties: 
earlier, — Worden, Moore's Early, Campbell, and 
Delaware; later, Catawba and Isabella, but these 
two varieties have quite disappeared from com- 
merce. The Niagara, a large white grape, ripens 
with the Concord; also the Agawam, Brighton, 
Hartford, and some eighty other varieties. But in 
planting a vineyard one must consider the end, — 
which is to raise grapes at a profit. Varieties to 
suit the owner may be set, as it were, for table use, 



104 An American Fruit-Farm 

but not for profit. A variety of grapes becomes a 
nuisance, like a variety of peaches or plums. The 
vineyardist needs to raise grapes on a large scale, 
so that he may harvest them at one time, with 
economy of labor. Varieties compel irregular 
picking, variety of packages, and extra labor. If 
varieties are raised, let there be enough of each to 
make the effort a commercial success. Five rows 
of a variety are a nuisance; five acres may be 
profitable. In planting a vineyard, care must be 
taken to secure regularity; straight rows; vines 
set sufficiently deep so as to protect the roots, not 
alone from frost but from the teeth of the tools. 
In wiring grapes, the rows may well be run so as to 
escape the violence of prevailing winds — that is, 
with the line of storms, not across it. Thus if 
by mishap a hailstorm visits the region, grapes 
which row with the storm escape better than those 
which traverse its course. In the Lake Shore Valley 
rows running parallel with the lake are less likely 
to suffer from storm, — a serious matter when acres 
must be re-tied after a northwester. But the Val- 
ley lies at the confluence of two vast circulatory 
systems of the continent: the St. Lawrence, and 
the Mississippi, and in consequence storms spring 
up quite without notice from any quarter. Few of 
these storms are violent, and for a period of nearly 
fifty years vineyards have been injured by hail 
but twice. It is folly to set out grapes on land 
that is not grape land. The traveler through the 
Valley will see many acres of such folly. The 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 105 

cost was too great and the vineyards have been 
neglected or abandoned. Nor does it truly pay 
to set a vineyard unless it is to be cared for cease- 
lessly, fed bountifully, trimmed wisely, and, in a 
word, kept at highest production. There are 
hundreds of acres of such fine vineyards in the 
Valley and the average yearly return — gross — for 
each acre is about one hundred and forty-five 
dollars. 

Strawberries require well-drained, rich, moist 
ground. The supreme test is the growth of root, 
stalk, and leaf, provided the variety is self -fertiliz- 
ing; if not, two varieties must be set, pistillate 
and staminate. A large, dark green leaf on a 
strong leaf -stalk means a large berry or cluster of 
berries. Irrigation is a temporary soil. The 
yellow root means health and vigor; the black root 
means age, weakness, and death. Repeated cul- 
tivation during the first season means fruit the 
second and is better than irrigation. Ceaseless 
hoeing of the strawberry bed raises the price of 
strawberries. This year's runners are next year's 
bearing plants. Plant the bed early; plant deep 
and set each root firmly with soil well pressed about 
the rootlets. The best strawberry beds are put 
out on rainy days in April. Late summer or fall 
planting is a sorry substitute for April setting. 
Strawberry raising is a special business and he who 
would succeed may well read the special Straw- 
berry Bulletins issued by the Experimental Sta- 
tions. Mulch the vines; keep them cool, moist, 



106 An American Fruit-Farm 

free from weeds and enemies, and you will have 
berries. In common experience the chief enemy 
is the white grub or cutworm, the larva of the 
ordinary August locust. It is said to spend seven- 
teen years underground, and seventeen days as 
locust, during which it lays its eggs against another 
subterranean sojourn. Every locust stands for 
seventeen ruined strawberry beds. The only 
remedy is to set the plants where there are no 
grubs, and this means in soil that has been worked 
deep and thoroughly for several years. Repeated 
plowing of the ground throws out the grubs that 
they may be devoured by birds and the patient 
hen. 

The strawberry plant is short-lived, for com- 
mercial purposes, and its fruit deteriorates after 
the first crop. Unless very near a good market, 
one better have a strawberry bed than a strawberry 
field. The crop must be handled quickly, at 
short distance from market, and with unusual skill, 
— if made profitable. The Marshall, Brandywine, 
Parker, and Eagle are, or were yesterday, desirable 
varieties; but each season brings new ones, more 
numerous than of plums or grapes. The desired 
berry is large, firm, of high color, of fine quality, 
odor, and taste. But the market demands a good 
shipping berry. Most of the best eating berries 
are poor shippers, and many good shippers are 
poor eating. So the fruit-farmer raises straw- 
berries for his own table and strawberries to sell 
to city folk who may not know the difference. It 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 107 

is a profitable crop but requires patience and what 
Napoleon called "the ignominious love of details." 
On a fruit-farm it is most desirable to raise early 
fruits, — those that market in June, July, August, 
rather than in October and November. It is most 
desirable to get off fruit in good weather; to clear 
up the year's work as early as possible. Straw- 
berries, raspberries, and cherries come early and are 
soon off the grower's hands. He gets his returns 
early in the season and is thus enabled to meet 
later expenses. 

Raspberries, black or red, and of the red, the 
earlier or the later, properly set out, will run, as a 
crop, for a dozen years, barring destruction by 
blight, rust, and winter-killing. The ideal thing 
is to secure and to maintain highly vigorous 
plants. Raspberries bear the third year and usu- 
ally regularly. Light, gravel, well-drained soil kept 
rich and moist produces fruit. But gravel land 
may dry out in May and June, or amidst picking 
time, and a heavier soil, a clay loam is better. No 
crop responds better to timely rains, which means 
that the root needs much moisture. This indi- 
cates the proper care of the raspberry patch : keep 
it well worked, stir the soil, irrigate with the cul- 
tivator. Nitrate of soda hurries up the growth 
of the canes, but barnyard manure or the best 
commercial substitute keeps the plant in vigor. 
The old canes must be cut out after the crop is 
picked. Running the cultivator through the patch 
during a drouth, whether or not the fruit is picked, 



108 An American Fruit-Farm 

will act as a rainfall. The Cuthbert, early or late, 
still holds its own as a red variety; the difference 
in time of ripening being about ten days, the later 
Cuthbert being the superior berry. Of black 
varieties, Kansas and Eureka are later than Con- 
rath or Palmer. The Marlboro competes with the 
Cuthbert in favor. Anthracnose, a fungous disease, 
is the worst enemy of the plant, but may be extermi- 
nated by spraying with Bordeaux mixture. After 
seven years the plants seem to get weary of the 
ground and have passed their maximum production, 
whence the rule with many growers not to keep a 
berry patch in one place more than five crops. 
Dewberries and blackberries require like soil and 
treatment: the danger as before being that the 
farmer will neglect the patch and let the canes dry 
up. There is no remedy for the red rust, save to 
dig out the diseased canes and burn them. The 
dewberry is practically exempt from disease, — the 
best variety, the Lucretia. 

Of blackberries, the Snyder, the Wilson, the 
Taylor. Some farmers plant raspberries, black- 
berries, or dewberries as a catch crop between the 
rows of young orchard and run the patch till the 
orchard begins to bear. The practice is not to be 
commended. Potatoes, corn, beans, carrots, tur- 
nips, strawberries may be so planted, but never 
berries borne on canes. The raspberry root is 
like that of a tree and the plant exhausts the soil 
over an area of several yards. One cannot raise 
two spears of grass on the same spot, much less a 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm 109 

cherry tree and a raspberry bush. The bush will 
gain on the tree; the berry-field, on the orchard. 
You are robbing the orchard while raising berries, 
nor can you fertilize the ground for both orchard 
and raspberries. The raspberry roots are persist- 
ent and can be exterminated only after costly 
labor, running through years. Your trees will 
suffer, and you started to raise an orchard not 
berries ; therefore give the orchard the right of way. 
A passing crop like potatoes, or any hill crop, 
even strawberries which last but two years, may 
be suffered, but do not neglect to fertilize both 
for the cover crop and for the trees. At best it is 
a doubtful venture, and when your orchard is at 
last in bearing, you will regret if you delayed and 
stunted it by a cover crop of raspberries, and will 
rejoice that you gave it the land. 

Currants and gooseberries demand rich, moist, 
well-drained land. England and central Ger- 
many — cool, moist regions of the earth — are the 
paradise for currants and gooseberries. America 
is too dry for the best fruit of this order. Yet, 
if they can be grown, both fruits are profitable. 
The care of the bush consists in cutting away dead 
branches and superfluous young ones. The fruit 
comes on the old canes and one must therefore 
trim with discretion. The enemy comes like a 
thief in the night, — borer, leaf blight, and currant 
worm. The astonished farmer discovers suddenly 
that his bushes are bare sticks. Before the blos- 
soms, spray with a weak solution of Paris green; 



no An American Fruit-Farm 

after the fruit forms, with pyrethrum, a tablespoon- 
ful in a gallon of water. This disposes of the worms. 
For leaf blight use Bordeaux mixture, applied 
carefully and not too strong ; for the borer, cut out 
the bush, root and branch, and burn quickly. All 
currant bushes are susceptible to disease. The 
standard varieties are Fay, Chautauqua, and 
Cherry, but there are others. The Victoria is 
considered most hardy. The Black Naples will 
make dark currant jelly and is a prolific producer. 
Gooseberries always call up vistas of English 
gardens, tarts, marmalade, and things generally 
sour, but the berry is gaining friends in America 
and proves highly profitable. Keep the plants 
moist, — which means constant cultivation and 
mulching. If spraying is necessary while in fruit, 
apply an ounce of sulphide of potassium in three 
gallons of water. But fungi are best kept off by 
assiduous cultivation of the gooseberry patch. 
The Downing is best adapted to America, as the 
Triumph, Lancashire Lad, and other European 
varieties are subject to mildew. 

In the Lake Shore Valley reports are made of 
large profits from strawberries, raspberries, cur- 
rants, and gooseberries. Experience has taught 
the folly of setting many varieties; one or two 
suffice, and the acreage should be large. One 
holding of sixty acres of currants is known. The 
returns per acre for raspberries have reached 
six hundred dollars gross, and more for goose- 
berries. A fair average for a carefully tilled field 



The Planting of the Fruit-Farm in 

would be, one year with another, about four 
hundred dollars. 

In planting the fruit-farm it is best to plan 
generously, giving each fruit its exclusive acreage 
and management according to its own nature. 
The profitable fruit-farm refuses to be mismanaged 
long; it pays or ceases to be a fruit-farm. One 
can raise plants, trees, vines, shrubs, roots of all 
kinds, — but this does not mean fruit. It is fruit 
we are after, not trunks, stems, stalk, and leaves. 
We plant the fruit-farm for fruit. As the military 
man would say, that is our "objective." There are 
several essential elements in our planting: climate, 
soil, drainage, selection of varieties, time of plant- 
ing, manner of planting, and trimming the new 
plant. Once the stock is set out, our work has 
only begun. 

We will therefore suppose that the site for the 
fruit -farm has been within the fruit belt, in whatso- 
ever part of America, and that the facilities for 
marketing have been duly considered. The well- 
drained land has been laid out into appropriate 
sections. The farm is unified by well-made roads 
and alleys. The question of varieties has been 
duly weighed; you have decided precisely what 
fruit you will raise. You have obtained only 
standard varieties from dependable nurserymen 
and have planted your trees, your shrubs, your 
berries, and your vines in the right way. You have 
provided for ample cultivation; assigned sufficient 
space for teams and tools; have avoided useless 



ii2 An American Fruit-Farm 

turns; have not crowded your planting but have 
well considered prospective spread of root and top, 
for mature, abundant fruitage. You have given 
yourself sufficient space not merely for cultivation 
of the plants but for administering all the business 
connected with them, — for ingress and regress of 
teams and wagons and for the economical handling 
of crops. You have considered well the problem 
of housing man and beast, tools and fruit. You 
have, in brief, to the best of your ability, after 
adequate examination of authorities and a decent 
respect for experience, obeyed the principle of 
horticultural economy, in buying land, in planning 
your plantation, in setting out your fruit of all 
kinds, and particularly in restricting yourself to 
few varieties. You have assembled your farming 
machine. Now it remains to run it productively. 



IV 



GETTING ALONG WITH HELP 

AT the bottom of fruit -farming is the labor 
"**■ question: somebody must do the work. 
Whatever the labor question that bothered our 
grandfathers, it is our labor question that bothers 
us. "How can I get the work on my fruit-farm 
done?" There is only one solution to this problem : 
Make the work so profitable that it will be desir- 
able to the persons you want to do the work. This 
is the only hope, not alone for the fruit-farmer but 
for every other employer of labor. But its realiza- 
tion is not easy. Walpole's dictum, "Every man 
has his price," is true in farming. Possibly the 
price is prohibitive to you; if so, you will not long 
run a fruit-farm; you will close the farm just as 
the manufacturer closes his factory. His ma- 
chinery speedily rusts into uselessness. Your farm 
quite as speedily runs wild. Both are ruined. 
But men must live; the laborer must labor, and 
every man is or ought to be a laborer. The 
farmer must farm, the manufacturer manufacture, 
or "chaos and dark night." 

Laboring, working, is not only the result of a 
8 113 



ii4 An American Fruit-Farm 

state of industry but of a state of mind. After all 
it is a psychological question. And here it is best 
to see clearly and straight. Labor is the supreme 
necessity of the fruit-farm. The wage of the 
laborer is his return for the use he makes of him- 
self. What is his most profitable use? Is it as 
he sees himself or as you see him? Essentially it 
is as world-conditions regulate matters. We are 
all prisoners of conditions, limitations, needs. 
Neither he nor you alone determines these. You 
as a fruit-grower depend upon the world-market; 
he as a laborer depends the same, through you, or 
whoever employs him, or gives him an opportunity 
to contribute to that market. The market condi- 
tions regulate the number and the wage of laborers 
in any activity. Farm work requires judicious 
planning in order to be successful. Horticulture 
is special farming. It is not "light farming, " — 
one room and a fireless cooker. Its risks are 
greater than those of general-farming; its returns 
are larger. Its labor shares in its conditions: 
greater skill and larger returns. But all labor on 
the fruit-farm is not expert. Indeed, most of it 
is unskilled, or at least is labor which any person, 
physically able to work, may readily do. It is of 
its kind and is regulated by demand and supply 
of its kind. Being unskilled, it is in general de- 
mand and therefore brings a general wage. But 
fruit-culture, being a special form of agriculture, 
requires labor of general skill for a special purpose, 
which tends to the limitation and selection of the 



Getting along with Help 115 

labor and therefore to a higher wage. Being a 
regular and acknowledged form of agriculture, it 
gives regular employment, but while, in the aggre- 
gate, continuously, few of the laborers are required 
all the year round. It is labor of its kind in season. 
In spring, the cultivation begins in April and runs, 
say, till mid-August. In late June, in July, 
August, September, October, November, there 
is fruit to pick, pack, and market. In winter, that 
is between harvest and spring, there is the trim- 
ming of vineyards and orchards, cutting out old 
berry brush, and tying grapes; also the applica- 
tion of some commercial fertilizers to the land. But 
much of the work on the fruit-farm concentrates 
within well-defined limits of plant growth, fruit 
growth, and harvest, adding the pruning season 
which varies somewhat according to the pressure 
of work on the farm. The work is of different 
kinds. Only an expert can trim orchard or vine- 
yard, but children can pick berries, and any person 
of ordinary skill can pick grapes, plums, cherries, 
peaches, prunes, and apples. Horticultural work 
therefore demands a relay of labor, but not con- 
tinuously; consequently the laborer must do much 
within a brief working period. This means piece 
work and relatively high wages, or no one will 
find such work desirable. To the owner of the 
fruit-farm all work is desirable, because if success- 
ful it is profitable. 

The labor question is largely one of locality. 
A fruit-farm near a populous center can always 



n6 An American Fruit-Farm 

secure labor. It may not be, it usually is not, 
skilled, or even experienced labor, but the art 
is soon learned. Transportation of the laborers 
must be provided ; they expect to be carried to and 
from their homes to their work. If this is not pro- 
vided, they straggle in at all hours and the work 
is delayed. Transportation means teams and 
wagons, drivers and expense. The fruit-farm may 
house the laborers during the season, as of berries, 
cherries, grapes, or peaches. This means conven- 
iences for bed and board and social and moral 
responsibilities. If the fruit-farm is favorably 
located for a supply of labor, it has not only in- 
dependence but additional monetary value. Its 
owner may the more insist on skill, conduct, 
promptness, which otherwise he could not hint at, 
save at the risk of suddenly losing his help. There- 
fore in selecting a site for a fruit-farm, primary 
attention should be given to the problem of the 
supply of labor. On the well-managed farm the 
same workers find employment year after year. 
They are treated fairly and generously and, if 
honest and square, will take a deeper interest in 
the farm as a permanent source of income. It is 
transitory help that costs most and is least produc- 
tive. The ideal fruit-farm has its clientele of help 
which accounts it a steady asset. There is mutu- 
ality of interest between fruit-grower and fruit- 
worker. 

Here may be realized the wisdom of fair, open, 
just, generous dealing, — not of course wasteful, 



Getting along with Help 117 

nor the payment of spasmodic prices which always 
cause the small fruit-growers apprehension. Labor 
always prefers the larger field as well as the higher 
price. Yet workers know a good thing and will 
come to the man whose fruit-farm is best managed, 
best equipped, and most productive. It is always 
the poor manager, the poor fruit-grower, the man 
of light crops, who has greatest difficulty to secure 
adequate help. Things breed after their kind; 
the best workers will always be found on the best 
farms. 

The whole matter hinges on the character of the 
manager and the conditions he imposes. You 
yourself decide the labor question. If labor cannot 
be had "for love or money" then you must close 
out. But love of money will work the farm. 
Right here, however, is the fundamental: Is 
there enough money in fruit-farming to pay the 
labor bill, the expense of administration, and to 
leave enough for a fair interest on the investment? 
This is more than a local question in the Lake 
Erie Valley. Railroads, canals, corporations, legis- 
lation, tariffs, employers' liability acts, combi- 
nations in restraint of trade, strikes, epidemics, 
wars, disasters by sea and land, the market, — all 
affect the fruit-farm. One may be able by reason 
of location to raise tons of fruit, yet be precluded 
by adverse conditions from realizing a penny on 
his crop. This may be said of any business. So 
far as concerns labor, we all hang or fall together. 
We cannot escape the conditions of industry. 



n8 An American Fruit-Farm 

Fruit-growing is a plunge into the game of living ; it 
is sometimes a gamble. We can only play accord- 
ing to the rules and abide results. The laborer 
in the field or the President in the White House 
can do no more. 

The young man who is contemplating fruit- 
growing as a vocation will find himself in the same 
world as he who takes up manufacturing, engineer- 
ing, or one of the black arts — law, medicine, or 
theology. The fundamental question with each 
is, "Am I supplying anything the world must 
have? " It is the problem of securing a dependable 
clientele, or, in other words, a steady market. 

Does the world want apples, cherries, grapes, 
currants, strawberries, prunes, peaches? 

Can you raise them? 

Can you deliver them to the market? 

Do you want to raise them and deliver them? 

Do you want to do this more than you want to 
do anything else? 

Or would you just as soon make shoes? Or 
clerk in a store? Or keep books? Or ring up 
fares in a trolley-car? Or practice law? Or 
preach? Or run for office? 

" 'Tis in ourselves, not in our stars, that we are 
underlings." 

The world will always eat fruit; indeed, in 
America the fruit-eating habit is spreading. Our 
hundred millions will soon become hundreds of 
millions of inhabitants, and each will eat fruit. 
The land area is not increasing. Fruit regions 



Getting along with Help 119 

are limited both in extent and in number. The 
proportion of demand of fruit to supply must in- 
crease. Fruit-growing as an industry is as stable 
as any branch of farming. Contrast it to fox- 
raising as undertaken on Prince Edward's Island. 
Will black fox always be in fashion? Will fruit 
always be in fashion? May fashion change in 
preference for silver fox skins? Will people drop 
out fruit for meat and cereals? Or will they con- 
sume fruit for health as well as because of the 
cost of cereals and meat? 

Here are some of the fundamentals to be weighed 
by the would-be fruit-grower. At present every 
vocation that can be called old is crowded and 
the rush for the new portends a speedy supply. 
There is now a rush for the land — a "return to 
the soil." The explanation lies in the ceaseless 
struggle for existence. The land question is the 
great question for all the world — the very great 
question in every civilized country. Land-grab- 
bing is the history of nations. The land means 
a livelihood, therefore, get land. Old-fashioned 
farming lingers somewhat in ill repute; new- 
fashioned farming means millions of money in- 
vested by syndicates and mere stock-holding, as 
evidence of claims to participation in profits from 
the land. "A fruit-farm for me ; a neat sort of life ; 
a bank account," is the dream of many a young 
man now surveying his hopes. 

Farming, like many another large activity, is 
breaking up into special activities: dairying, stock- 



120 An American Fruit- Farm 

raising, poultry-raising, duck-farming, truck-farm- 
ing, mushroom-raising, fruit-growing. In the old 
days one farm attempted to do all of these; to-day, 
one farmer raises wheat; another, vegetables; 
another, berries ; another, peaches ; another, grapes ; 
another, cherries ; another, apples. The day of the 
division of labor has reached the land, just as it 
long since reached engineering, law, and medicine. 
Each new agricultural specialty is an undiscovered 
country; a new world, which the young man, alive 
to his opportunities, hastens to exploit. Turn to 
the catalogue of one of the great universities and 
note the division and subdivision of instruction. 
The story is told of Cornell University that in an 
early day, President White, who was far ahead of 
his times in matters academic, wrote to a certain 
professor at Brown inquiring whether he would 
accept the chair of History, or Political Science, 
or Economics. Promptly came the reply, "Yes, 
all." The President is said to have informed the 
accomplished professor that the Trustees had 
established a chair, not a settee. Farms are be- 
coming chairs and ceasing to be settees. Speciali- 
zation in farming is only one aspect of modern 
industrial life. Whatever the specialization on the 
farm, it is a vocation which demands expert 
knowledge, and because it demands such knowl- 
edge it is a vocation. Old-fashioned farming was 
a general occupation ; the new farming is a special 
labor. And deeper than this, farming, as the 
world is beginning to realize, is a very difficult 



Getting along with Help 121 

business, demanding other knowledge than mere 
rule of thumb. The earth, the soil, is a chemical 
laboratory whose operations must be understood 
if the supply of food is to equal the demand. The 
world must starve on old-fashioned methods of 
farming. Here again it is "grinding necessity" 
that calls men back to the land. The truth is that 
we know very little about the land as the producer 
of food. We have here and there slightly scratched 
its surface, exhausted its vitality, and ignored its 
chemistry. By chemistry we do not mean a shelf 
of dirty bottles filled with mysterious fluids which 
burn, or of boxes of curious salts which unexpected- 
ly explode. It is not a case of freshman chemistry. 
We mean that the earth is a storehouse, a labora- 
tory of infinite resources. Everything from the 
soil; everything back to the soil, — this is the cycle 
of the world before our eyes. Whence follows the 
fundamental importance of the soil. And this 
importance, recognized however partially in our 
day, explains the present interest in all forms of 
farming. 

Then too, in our day, our country is no longer 
isolated, or its numerous business centers and 
local markets inaccessible; the railroads, the trolley 
lines, the automobile bring the American world 
together. Youth loves companionship, not soli- 
tude, and the fruit-farm of to-day is a suburb. 
Women set the pace of life and diversion is within 
reach of the farmer. Excessive urbanity, if I may 
use the word as meaning city-ness, wearies, yes, 



122 An American Fruit-Farm 

wears out its votaries, and human nature revolts 
against too much — or too little — evening dress. 
The strain and stifle of big business, filtering down 
upon clerks and employees, leaves an insatiable 
yearning for the poise of the country. Nature 
will have her own. Yet there is quite as much 
sanity in city as in country life; the lines of least 
resistance lead to the country rather than to the 
city; to the fruit-farm rather than to the clerkship 
in a down-town office. Salaries are low; the cost 
of living, high; promotion, slow; the prizes few 
and mostly bespoken by favorites of fortune rather 
than by the Girards, the Stewarts who to-day are 
keeping books or handling the yard-stick. The 
freedom of the country has greater charm than the 
freedom of the city. 

Then, too, there is profit in fruit-farming, — not 
the sudden profit of the oil-regions in the old days; 
or of the mines; or of the Stock-Exchange, but the 
steady, reliable profit of a sound business eminently 
respectable. Thus the fruit-farm seems along the 
line of least resistance to the young man of energy 
and specially to him of uncertain health. Wealth 
accumulates and men decay, and the delicate sons 
of fortune now seek health in orchard and vineyard. 
America is now old enough and rich enough to turn 
to fruit-farming. The Old World has been trying 
it for centuries. Cato, who wrote on farming 
nearly two centuries before the Christian era, 
reads like a modern horticultural writer; and this 
because farming, real farming, never grows old. 



Getting along with Help 123 

It is a classic labor, and the classic, whatever its 
form, is immortal. Before many years the avail- 
able fruit-land of our country will have been taken 
up. Chemical and horticultural knowledge will 
in later times, and yet at no very distant time, turn 
to land now ignored, and convert it into fruit - 
plantations. It is improbable that any fruit-land 
will be abandoned. On the contrary, the best 
located fruit -lands will increase in value, though 
not, relatively, in productive power, save as 
intensively cultivated. This is the condition on 
the continent of Europe, and notably in Germany. 
Pressure of population means necessary intensive 
cultivation of the land. The problem of fruit- 
growing is therefore one of knowledge, increasing 
with experiment and experience. 

The fruit-grower depends upon labor; without 
it, soil, productivity, location, are as nothing. 
Fruit-growing is a special business and requires 
expert knowledge in the grower. Here it is the 
attitude of the grower towards labor that largely 
determines the labor question. In America, as 
the years pass, there is less and less disposition 
for one man to work for another. The relation 
between employer and employee is more or less 
strained and the tension makes or mars the crop. 
As yet labor has not learned that it may not 
become the employer rather than the employed. 
The very easiness of life in America has bred our 
labor difficulties. No man is willing to settle down 
for life as a laborer. The rise from poverty to 



124 An American Fruit-Farm 

riches, of employee to employer; of day laborer 
to owner of the plant, is a familiar tradition; infre- 
quent in fact, and more familiar in the past than 
it can be in the future. Fundamentally it is a 
question of natural resources. So long as there 
remain undeveloped resources, of magnitude, in 
America, such as was the entire continent for 
generations, the transition from poverty to riches, 
conspicuous in the iron and steel, the lumber, the 
copper, the coal, lead, and oil interests in past 
times, may confidently be expected. The chances 
diminish in geometrical proportion as population 
increases. This is the history of all older countries. 
All men in America believe, or profess to believe, 
that they are born free and equal, but no man 
believes that he was born to remain a mere, un- 
skilled laborer. Granting full scope to the doctrine 
of equality, we know by observation, and doubtless 
by experience, that all men are not born to be 
employers of labor. In other words, it does not 
appear that all men in America are born, industri- 
ally considered, very differently than are all men 
in other civilized lands. But it does appear, in 
every country, more and more as time passes, that 
the station in which a man is born is the station 
in which he will live and die. This is inevitable. 
All the phenomenal rise of captains of industry, 
multi-millionaires, favorites of fortune and of 
Congress, characterize this our earlier national 
history, — if the word national can be so applied. 
The trend, the world over, is toward fixidity of 



Getting along with Help 125 

conditions. There remain no continents to ex- 
plore; the opportunities which were distinctively 
American, cannot recur. Democracy moves ever 
towards the goal of fixidity of privilege, because it 
moves toward equality. 

Fruit-growing is one of the opportunities of the 
present, as was the conquest of Mexico by Cortes 
and his band in the past. Specialization always 
means an opportunity for labor as well as for capital. 
In a new specialty wages are always high. They 
are high to-day in horticulture. So long as fruit 
sells for good prices, the "labor question," as the 
phrase goes, will not embarrass the fruit-farm. 
Break and scatter the fruit-market and wages on 
fruit-farms must fall. Strengthen the market; 
establish the fruit-eating clientele; get all our 
people to consume many times their present 
consumption of fruit, and wages on fruit-farms will 
rise. The wage problem on the fruit-farm is the 
problem of supply and demand; of expert service 
and of unskilled labor; of widening or decaying 
markets ; of the habits of our people, whether they 
become and remain notably a fruit-eating people. 
The laborer is but one cog in an immense wheel; 
he is not his own master no more than is the fruit- 
grower. World conditions crib, cabin, and confine 
both employer and employee. 

Facing present conditions, or the aspect of these 
which we interpret, the prospect is of betterment. 
As yet we have not begun to raise, much less to 
consume, fruit. Our climate compels us to eat 



126 An American Fruit-Farm 

fruit as an essential food. Ours is a stimulating, a 
trying, an exhausting climate, variable, change- 
able, capricious, wet, dry, hot, cold, — a climate of 
sudden extremes. In some American valleys a 
change of forty degrees in forty-eight hours is not 
uncommon at any season of the year. This is due 
to location, — the valley lying, for instance, like 
that of Lake Erie, along the edge of two vast 
basins, — the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi. 
But America as a climatic world is the home of 
petty tumult, revolts, revolutions of heat and 
cold, of drouth and rainfall. Grinding necessity 
will keep us a temperate — that is, a non-alcoholic 
people. The alcoholic peoples inhabit the British 
Isles, Scandinavia, Russia at the north. These 
regions are not a fruit-land as is ours, or as is 
southern Europe. Germany, France, and Italy are 
less alcoholic than England, Scotland, and Ireland. 
Switzerland resembles England, as does Russia, 
Finland, and northern Hungary. But all Europe 
is less a fruit-country than is all America. The 
time is not far away when our country will be ex- 
porting to Europe all our fruits that bear carriage. 
Europe will import wines from America, — an 
importation already begun. Paradoxical as this 
may seem, it is written in the law of climate. 
Florida, Texas, California, and other vast and 
favored fruit-regions of America will monopolize 
the world's production of oranges, lemons, grape- 
fruit, figs, olives, raisin-grapes, wines, dried and 
canned fruits. Already America, including Canada 



Getting along with Help 127 

and its neighbors, monopolizes the apple-trade of 
the world. 

This means that our fruit-market is a world- 
market. There will be no exception: apples, 
peaches, prunes, cherries, apricots, English wal- 
nuts, chestnuts, pecans, hazel-nuts, and berries of 
all kinds. The outlook therefore is encouraging 
for the fruit-grower. Labor seeks opportunity, 
and fruit-raising will give more and more employ- 
ment to labor, at fair, if not at high wages. Fruit- 
growing will become more and more a profession, 
a business, demanding expert preparation and 
service. And expert labor of any kind is always 
well paid. The market being the world-at-large, 
the demand for fruits must increase. Americans 
who have traveled in all lands have remarked 
again and again on the presence of American food- 
stuffs, — canned goods, prepared fruits, of familiar 
brands. The Arab in the desert breakfasts on 
fruits prepared and preserved in American fac- 
tories. Sailors in seas most remote are served 
American-made foods. Savages — the curious few 
who remain — barter skins, feathers, and totems for 
a jar of Pittsburgh pickles. The price of fruits as 
compared with that of other foods must remain 
fair, and the fruit-grower must therefore pay fair 
wages for labor. 

All transportation companies will consider the 
fruit-grower, not altruistically unless compelled 
to; but the aggregate freight to be hauled from 
orchards, vineyards, from berry and truck fields 



Getting along with Help 129 

to include quite all sorts and conditions of men. 
Directly the fruit interests of the country are 
imperilled by insect or fungus, or by commercial 
discriminations, or by governmental folly, or by 
the even greater folly of ignorance among fruit- 
growers themselves, then it appears how important 
are these interests to the world of labor. And yet 
there are always men and women to be found who 
are in a hurry to kill the goose that lays the golden 

egg- 
In recent years both Congress and the State 
Legislatures have enacted many laws vitally affect- 
ing farming in all its branches. Granting that 
the general purpose of this mass of legislation is for 
the betterment of all people, nevertheless some of 
this legislation has been distinctively hostile to the 
farmer. He is the basis and foundation in our 
economic structure. It is right and proper that 
he put up sound fruit, that he give full measure, 
that he mark his products so that the consumer 
may know precisely the quantity, quality, and 
variety he is buying. The so-called "Pure Food" 
"Employers' Liability," and "Package" laws 
have this desirable end in view. But these 
laws are not infrequently drawn by men who 
have no practical knowledge of farming, what- 
soever branch may be affected by the law. It 
follows that hostile legislation — perhaps unwit- 
tingly enacted — places the farmer at a great dis- 
advantage. For instance, it is desirable to have 
an employers' liability act for all occupations more 



1 30 An American Fruit-Farm 

or less dangerous. But as our Supreme Court has 
read the word "reasonable" into the Sherman Act, 
we may conclude that an unreasonable law is no 
law. Farm labor is entitled to protection. The 
negligence of employers, when farmers, must be 
checked as among other employers. Rotten 
ladders, vicious horses, rotten harness, wagons, 
barn-floors, and the like exist by the culpable 
negligence of the owner. But the laborer must 
also take care. Is the farmer responsible for the 
accident which befalls an employee who ignores all 
counsel as to danger? Should the land, the farm 
itself, be made answerable for such culpability 
and the farmer by law be denied any defense? Has 
the farmer a right to show that he was not in any 
way contributory to the injury received? Should 
it be the presumption of the law that the farmer 
is guilty of contributory negligence and, as in the 
old English law of libel, — "The greater the truth, 
the greater the libel," the more serious the injury 
received by the employee, the greater the negli- 
gence of the employer? Farmers seem incapable 
of organizing for their own interests. The labor 
question is, after all, the great practical question 
in fruit-farming. 



V 



THE CULTIVATION OF THE FRUIT-FARM 

CULTIVATION of the soil is keeping its drain- 
age system — that is, its circulation — in order. 
The circulation of the blood in our bodies ceasing, 
life ceases. The circulation of soluble plant-food 
in the soil ceasing, plant-growth, plant-life cease. 
So long as the plant is growing and ripening its 
fruit, cultivation furthers growth. But we must 
remember that we do not raise plants as does 
Nature in the wild. We demand as food the 
fattened leaf, root, bulb, tuber, stem, stalk, or 
pulp. The grape-seed, or fruit proper, is useless 
to us; the juice and pulp are food. We culti- 
vate- the fruit orchard, or the vineyard, not for 
seed, but for pulp. Therefore all our labor is 
concentrated upon doing, quite abnormally a 
mere part of the whole which Nature under- 
takes. We eat the pulp of the fruit and cast 
the seed away, as of cherries, peaches, plums, 
prunes, apples, pears, apricots, grapes, berries of 
all kinds, currants; not the fruit or seed of po- 
tato, turnip,* beet, or radish, but tuber, or root. 
The whole problem of fruit-culture is to con- 

131 



132 An American Fruit-Farm 

centrate plant-growth at one stage, or in some 
part of plant-development. 

We are fattening the goose, not for eggs, but for 
swollen, overgrown livers. We raise ostriches for 
feathers; we grow vineyards for juice and pulp, 
not for grape-seeds. Our problem then is to deflect 
the vitality of the plant toward the abnormal over- 
production of a particular part or organ. We 
are ever breaking the balance of the plant's life. 
This emphasis on the part accounts for many, if 
not for most, of the diseases of our cultivated 
plants. Rarely is a plant in the wild diseased. 
There, it is true, only the fittest and favored sur- 
vive, but the millions that perish die of starvation, 
not of disease. Cultivated plants die of disease 
brought on by overfeeding, or weakening one 
part at the expense of another. Thus dwarf 
varieties of fruit are always less hardy than the 
normal stock, and shorter-lived. The three hun- 
dred and more varieties of grapes are three hun- 
dred and more times as susceptible to disease as 
the wild vine. There is a law of compensation 
that runs through all fruit-growing: the more 
delicate the quality and gross the quantity of a 
fruit, the more liable is it to suffer from disease. 
The so-called "finest varieties" are rarely hardy. 

It is best to understand at the very outset in 
fruit-growing, that we are engaged in a somewhat 
artificial business. We seek to produce our kind of 
fruit, whether or not it is Nature's, and yet we 
demand that the tree or vine shall maintain its 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 133 

health. We stimulate men to propagate varieties 
of fruit which emphasize, exaggerate, overdevelop 
some quality or aspect of the plant at the cost of 
atrophy of some other part, and usually of all as- 
sociated parts. In other words, in fruit-growing we 
are aiming at a very fine, possibly a very obscure, 
mark on the bull's eye, and insisting that this is 
our true center. We are particularizing, specializ- 
ing, propagating leaf, stalk, or seed-pulp, at the 
expense of the rest of the plant. We must there- 
fore follow strictly a particular procedure, or we 
shall fail of our particular purpose. 

In fruit-culture all is included in the care of the 
plant. This care means the concentration of the 
plant's energies upon the production of what we 
want. We are tampering with the plant's balance 
of powers. This we do by budding, grafting, 
trimming, and feeding the plant. But in order to 
make plant-food available we must keep the soil 
drained. This we do by cultivating the surface. 
There is only one rule in cultivation: Early and 
often. 

Budding and grafting are expert work done at 
the nursery, rarely on the farm. The fruit- 
grower's work begins with trimming, or pruning, 
as a means of concentrating the vitality of the 
plant upon the production of such fruit as he 
wants. The best orchard or vineyard or berry 
patch always looks young, thrifty, strong in latent 
vigor. The orchardist trims with a sharp knife 
and a fine saw and never cuts off a large limb save 



134 An American Fruit-Farm 

of necessity. A storm breaks down the tree or 
disease infects a limb. Then we do as best we 
can, and may be obliged to cut away a large limb. 
This shocks the tree, possibly even to death. 
Disease in the form of myriads of spores of fungi, 
at times floating in the air, promptly enters the 
wound. To prevent this we seal it against such 
invasion by a coat of tar or paint, which will resist 
wind and weather. If the scar is not too great, and 
the tree too old or too weak, the wound will heal 
over under an ample growth of bark. But we 
must not keep the tree ever healing scars. It is 
like keeping a man in hospital. In cutting the 
limb we make the cut at an angle to shed water, 
and as close to the body, or main stalk, as may be 
so as to give the tree as little healing to do as we 
may. Bad trimming kills as many trees, or makes 
them unfruitful, as do fungi or insects. The art of 
pruning cannot be learned wholly from books. 
It is the tree we are conserving. Nowadays we 
train our fruit-trees to head and fruit low, for ease 
in harvest. We head them back at every trim- 
ming; we admit sunshine from circumference to 
center and seek constantly to secure short, straight, 
strong trunks, with branches well balanced to the 
four winds. The rule is to keep the top in balance. 
The time to trim is when your pruning knife is 
open and sharp and you see what should be done. 
Winter, the leafless time, is usually when the 
trimming is done, and chiefly because the orchard - 
ist can then best attend to it. In summer the 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 135 

chapter of accidents is written by wind and storm 
(even as in winter) and you must cut out bruised 
branches. Doubtless the best time to trim is at 
any time after the fruit is picked and before the 
tree starts growing in the spring. The order in 
trimming is sprouts, twigs, branches, limbs. Note 
the order. In cutting off either, you concentrate 
what remains upon the work you want done. 

Do you want quantity or quality of fruit? You 
trim accordingly. Trimming off branches or 
thinning the newly-set fruit is the same thing in 
kind. Nothing is gained by over-fruiting. Some 
trees, under our artificial orchard life, will fruit 
themselves to death. Nature takes a preventive 
hand in the game by blowing off thousands of 
blossoms, later, by cutting out thousands of newly- 
set fruit, and latest, by covering the ground be- 
neath with rejected apples, cherries, peaches, and 
pears. No tree can mature all its blossoms. As 
a last stroke, the wind winds up the tree in a crash 
of ruin. If you want fruit of first quality and size, 
thin out to taste, which means that you fill more 
baskets with fewer peaches or prunes and get a 
larger price than were you to let all the fruit that 
forms struggle toward an unattainable maturity. 

Some trees require but little pruning, as cherries 
and the plum family generally; others require 
much, as apples and peaches. Of grape-trimming 
I have already spoken. The safe rule for all fruit- 
plants is to cut out dead and superfluous growth. 
But the difficulty is to determine what is superflu- 



136 An American Fruit-Farm 

ous. Orchard trimming begins at planting and 
continues during the life of the tree. During the 
first five years the shape of the tree is fixed. Avoid 
the two-limbed or Y-shaped trunk, which is a 
constant invitation for the wind to split. Three 
or four limbs in balance give the true form. If you 
cannot avoid the two-limbed trunk, and wind or 
snow or ice or heavy crop split the tree, you may 
perhaps save your tree, even for years of service, 
by bolting the split limbs together and holding the 
limbs above the split by a few wire strings, care- 
fully protecting the bark against the wire by means 
of pieces of wood. By twisting the wire like a 
tourniquet you may ease the strain on the bolt. 
The tree may grow together and serve you many 
years; but you will have to watch the wire, insert 
new blocks of wood, and favor the tree by rather 
heavier trimming than usual. A hoop, or chain, or 
wire should never be allowed to come directly 
against the bark; it will girdle the limb. The 
crevice in the split may well be filled with grafting 
wax or tar or paint to keep out water. If the tree 
is one in a large orchard and is young, prudence will 
root it out and set another in its place. The 
supreme rule of the orchard is to have only strong, 
healthy bearing trees. Weaklings take all the la- 
bor and amount to nothing. It is best to supplant 
all old trees, which are past their prime, by new 
ones. The added profit of the new tree will com- 
pensate for the loss of the old one. Remember that 
it is the best trees which pay all the expenses of the 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 137 

inferior ones. Therefore have as few poor ones as 
possible. Strawberries are best trimmed by setting 
a new bed every year. Raspberries, dewberries, 
and blackberries must be trimmed annually by 
cutting out the old canes. Currants require some 
trimming, but chiefly of dead wood, broken canes, 
and superfluous sprouts. Gooseberries must be 
trimmed to keep them within bounds. 

Of tree fruit the peach ever tends to overgrowth 
of foliage and therefore bears vigorous trimming; 
no other tree so much. "Heading back" is the 
rule with peaches. Such trimming prolongs the 
life of the tree and prevents its reaching an un- 
manageable height. Trimming the tree low pre- 
vents wind-break and all its evils. But greatest 
care must be taken to make clean cuts, close to the 
body of limb or trunk, and, if possible, to paint all 
large wounds. The tree, if healthy, soon grows a 
cover of bark over small cuts. When the tree has 
been lacerated by wind-breakage, the bruise 
should be cut down smooth and painted over 
against rot and disease. Sweet cherry trees are 
brittle, are subject to the borer and to rot. High 
winds play havoc with them, and ice storms are 
their great enemy. It is always perilous to risk 
much weight on the limb of the tree. I do not 
speak here of tree-diseases but of trimming. One 
can soon discover which of his trees grow slowly, 
which rapidly. The rapid growers require heaviest 
pruning. Fruit of quality means abundant sun- 
light ; therefore the rule is for open centers. Earth 



138 An American Fruit-Farm 

and sun will do the rest. An open center does not 
mean a cave, or a shell-like top. It means ventila- 
tion and sunlight : no more. Pruning and trimming 
may be perennial. Carry your pruning-knife in 
your pocket and trim at any time; tar and paint- 
pot are not needed when you use the knife. 

Grapevines must be tied as well as trimmed. 
They must hang in the air, not lie on the ground. 
Grape-trimming, in the Lake Shore Valley, is the 
winter job. It may begin as soon as the grapes 
are picked and the leaves have fallen; it must be 
finished before the sap starts in the spring. But 
every wind brings down the vines and calls out 
men and women with their bunches of string, cut 
in length, to tie up the vines again to the wires. 
When the vineyard is trimmed and the canes — 
three or four in number — are fastened to the 
wires, short lengths of a fine wire are used. No 
small part of the expense of running a vineyard is 
caused by the trimming and tying of the vines, 
particularly the tying after a high wind. When 
the vines are trimmed and tied and the brush has 
been hauled out from the rows and burned, the 
vineyard is ready for cultivation. This begins as 
soon as you can work the land ; whence the desira- 
bility of having "early land" — that is, light 
gravel, or loam, as against a stiff, heavy clay. Yet 
the heavy clay land, though it cannot be worked 
early, produces grapes fine in quality and abun- 
dantly. But it is hard ground to work and there- 
fore the more expensive. In the Lake Shore Valley 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 139 

it is cheaper in price and lies along and near the 
summit of the hills. It is higher above the sea 
level than the gravel and loam lands of the Valley ; 
higher by from one hundred to a thousand feet. 1 

The manner of cultivating a vineyard is not a 
matter of common agreement among fruit-growers. 
They are unanimous that the vineyard should be 
cultivated, — but of details let no man speak, ex- 
pecting every man's approval. Following the prin- 
ciples of plant -growth, it is evident that the time 
in which to cultivate a vineyard is while the 
vines are growing. We cultivate both for vine 
and for fruit. When vineyards were first planted 
in the Valley, from 1855 to i860, and for some 
thirty years later, fruit-growers thought only of the 
fruit, taking the growth of vine for granted; but 
since 1890, the vine food, so to speak, in the soil 
has decreased and the vines have been stimulated 

1 The mean level of Lake Erie is 572.8 feet above mean sea level. 
The land of the Lake Erie Valley rises rapidly from the lake level; 
indeed the beach is narrow, — rarely more than three rods, and most of 
the shore is a series of bluffs, quite steep, overhanging the beach from 
fifty to two hundred feet. From the top of the bluff the land rises in 
successive waves which form the floor of the Valley. This is from two 
to two and one half miles wide to the foot of the hills, at the south. 
The hillside is a gradual rise, attaining to the crest, or fruit-limit, at 
the south, a height of from seven hundred and fifty to thirteen hundred 
feet. There are fields of gravel and of clay both in the Valley proper 
and on the hillsides. The gravel and loam is common south of the 
fruit-limit. This limit coincides precisely with the area ventilated 
by the lake winds. Practically all land from which the lake is visible 
is fruit-land. The frost line mentioned in the third chapter marks 
accurately the line along which the lake may be seen. In later years 
fruit-culture has been pushed well up to this line and somewhat dis- 
astrously to the south of it. 



140 An American Fruit-Farm 

to bear fruit, often at the expense of the vine and 
to the serious injury of the vineyard. We hear, 
therefore, nowadays of "the growth of wood" 
as little or great, and men are learning "no vine, 
no wine." 

First, last, and all the time the fruit-grower 
needs a strong, healthy vine. Stable manure 
in quantity is needed, or its equivalent. This 
means, with the disappearance of cattle and hogs 
and stock from our fruit valleys, that resort must 
henceforth be had to cover-crops plowed in, — 
the clovers, vetches, beans, and turnips. If you 
can begin the cultivation of your vineyard by 
plowing in a heavy cover of barnyard manure, or 
a heavy growth of some cover-crop, you are taking 
no uncertain step towards profit. Which clover 
you shall use, — crimson, mammoth, or Alsach, or 
whatsoever this crop may be, you sowed it the 
season before, directly you had completed your 
year's cultivation of the vineyard. This means 
not later than the opening days of August, or even 
two weeks earlier, — as the season may permit. It 
is a stiff job plowing a vigorous growth of clover, 
in bloom, and the more complete the growth the 
more valuable as fertilizer. The requisite is 
perfect turning of the sod so as to make a clean 
job. Then follow in succession, the season 
through, disc-plowing, horse-hoeing, hand-hoeing, 
cultivating with the two-horse cultivator, — the 
number of times all this is done depending upon 
the capacity of the fruit-grower to raise grapes. 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 141 

What is needed is thorough stirring (drainage) 
of the ground. If your land is like an ash heap and 
is full of humus, you have done your work right. 
You keep down the weeds in order to stir and drain 
the soil. You stir the soil so as to keep its food 
supply in circulation. Grapes root both wide and 
deep; they tap the soil at top and bottom. They 
endure moderate heat (75°-90°) and protracted 
drouth, provided your soil is like an ash-heap and 
filled with humus. The color and size of leaf and 
the length of vine of the summer's growth test the 
health of your vineyard. The grape blossoms in 
mid- June, in the Lake Shore Valley; in mid-July the 
growth of vine is sweeping the ground between 
the rows and the leaf is of full size. In mid- August 
the grapes are two-thirds full size and the leaves 
are shading into brown and curling at the edge. 
In mid-September the brown has darkened, the 
leaves are becoming brittle, the fruit is of a tint 
of red. In mid-October the leaf has ceased its 
functions and here and there lies dead beneath the 
rows; the fruit is purple and odorous. The pickers 
are in the field and the harvest is on. If your 
vineyard turns brown in July, or early August, 
you may know that your land lacks humus and 
nitrogen; that your vines have not enough to eat. 
You will discover that the feeble vines have stunted 
and scraggly bunches. "Feed your vine and make 
your wine, " is the old German proverb. 

If you have made your soil aright, you have fed 
the vineyard both for vine and fruit. You have 



142 An American Fruit-Farm 

kept your team and men at work till late July, ever 
cultivating the soil. Then, when the ground is 
like an ash-heap and cultivation is over, you sow 
(or drill) your cover-crop, to be plowed in for 
nitrogen next year. If you are fortunate and get 
in your clover seed just before a rain, it will germi- 
nate in three days, under an August sky. By the 
time snow flies, your clover will quite cover the 
ground and stand nine inches high. Whatever 
nitrogenous cover-crop is used, its value depends 
upon the growth it has made when plow-time comes 
in the spring. This means as early as possible 
sowing the previous season and this cannot be 
earlier than the last cultivation of the vineyard. 
It is not the clover top but the clover root that 
stores up the desired nitrogen in the soil for avail- 
able use. Really the cover-crop is under ground, 
though we commonly measure its value by leaf, 
stem, and blossom. In order to get an early sowing 
of this cover-crop, the fruit-grower must have 
begun his spring plowing as soon as the weather 
permitted. Early begin, early win. It is the late 
summer and the fall growth of the clover that gives 
it worth ; or, if let grow and blossom in spring, all 
haste must be made in order to get in the culti- 
vation necessary during May, June, and July. 
August cultivation is largely merely marking 
time. While we do not raise fruit in order to 
raise a cover-crop of clover, vetch, or turnips, 
these must be raised and must sufficiently mature 
to be of use, or we must apply barnyard manure. 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 143 

There is no other way of securing humus in the 
soil. 

It is therefore on schedule time that the cultiva- 
tion of the vineyard must be done. Delays here 
are not merely dangerous, — they are fatal. As you 
ride through the Lake Shore Valley inspecting 
fruit-farms in July — the best time to judge their 
condition — you will discover that orchards and 
vineyards — indeed all crops, in soil like an ash- 
heap and filled with humus — deep, moist soil — 
are always of a dark green color; the growth of wood 
is abundant as their canes, well-fruited, will attest. 
The presence of weeds does not always show neglect 
of the orchard or vineyard. It is the hard, baked 
soil, the old stubborn sod, the wire and quack- 
grass, the goldenrod and the milkweed, the sour- 
dock and the sorrel at which you take warning. 
If the ground beneath the grape-row is green with 
chickweed you may know that the soil is rich and 
mellow. Chickweed is potash growing and has no 
superior as a friend to the fruit-grower. It never 
is seen on poor soil. Were I asked to name the 
simplest, surest test of a well-fed soil, I would ask, 
Does it grow chickweed? July is rather early 
for this little friend, but if you have cultivated your 
vineyard aright, it comes of itself. In September 
the soil seems surcharged with its tiny seeds (Who 
ever saw one?) eager to germinate, to cover your 
land with a thick, green cover, which will be a 
winter blanket protecting your plantation. And 
there are other weeds which are good signs, — as 



144 An American Fruit-Farm 

pigweed and burdock which mean rich, moist 
soil. But the daisy, the gypsumweed, mean 
hard, lean land, neglected, and the brown grass 
on untilled land means soil-starvation. Nature 
abhors naked earth, and hastens to cover it over 
with a blanket of green; grass if she can, weeds 
if she must. I believe in a well-covered soil in 
winter ; a well-cultivated soil in spring and summer ; 
a food-filled soil in autumn. Left to herself, 
Nature grows grass and weeds on our plantation. 
Then come November winds and December snows, 
and freezing and thawing of the earth in January 
and February, and the weariness of March and its 
desolation. If the earth is well covered by a 
matting of straw, dead grasses, weeds, even a 
blanket of snow, — shrub, tree, or vine will suffer no 
harm. Raw, uncovered land in winter is leached 
by storm, by rain, snow, and ice, and so loses its 
virtues. The snow is our friend if we can get it to 
lie still, even to the depth of a foot on the ground. 
But if it blows hither and yon and the land is 
swept by the besom of the storm, now covered with 
snow, now bare-blown, the surface freezing and 
bleaching, vast injury is done. The surface 
drainage of the soil is quite destroyed and alternate 
freezing and thawing of the earth means death to 
many a tree and vine. In some vineyards, planted 
in stiff, strong clay, the vines will be quite thrown 
out of ground, so that the first horse-hoeing quite 
completes the ruin, if the tool is held by a careless 
hand. It is usual, all over the Valley, to horse- 



The Cultivation of the Fruit- Farm 145 

hoe a last time just before sowing the cover-crop. 
This raises a ridge of earth against the vines to a 
height of eight or even ten inches and protects them 
against too severe extremes of wintry weather. 

The stock of tree or vine is small part of its 
feeding organs. These are the rootlets, deep in 
the soil, or spread a few inches beneath the sur- 
face. It is these surface roots, within the reach of 
the frost, which we protect summer and winter. If 
the snow overlays them to a depth of a foot or 
more, and remains all winter long, the soil never 
bared to the frost, it will keep an even temperature, 
and if the snow is deep enough the ground will not 
freeze. A permanent snow cover is one of Nature's 
means of protecting the soil. Weeds, grass, and 
cover-crops generally catch and hold the snow and 
keep it quiet the winter long. The scantier the 
snowfall the greater the need of the cover-crop. 
Thus the clover and the vetch serve as faithfully 
in winter as in spring when they are plowed in 
to feed the plant. It is like an overcoat in winter 
and a loaf of bread the rest of the year. I attach 
greatest importance to blanketing the soil in winter 
with snow and a matting of straw, clover, vetch, 
grass, weeds, and especially chickweed. Nearly 
every fruit-farm has some hillock or slope that is 
swept by the winds and washed by the rains. It 
washes rather than drains. The snows never cover 
it in winter and it is difficult to get a "catch" of 
any cover-crop in summer. It is the hard, barren, 
unprofitable spot on the farm. The only thing to 



146 An American Fruit-Farm 

be done with it is to cover heavily with stable 
manure to secure humus, and to apply the com- 
mercial fertilizers more generously than elsewhere 
on the farm. It is the most expensive spot on the 
plantation. If such spots are many, you better 
own some other land, for this spot is expensive to 
work, difficult to keep in health, unfriendly to 
tree or vine, and productive, if at all, of fruit small 
in quantity and poor in quality. Some fruit- 
growers choose such hillocks for orchard sites, 
under the unreasonable tradition that trees like 
hillsides and hilltops. Doubtless you can raise 
trees — rather poor trees, — but you will have 
difficulty in raising fruit on such spots. Some 
fruit-growers, knowing no better, and owning many 
such barren cones, think they are raising fruit. 
As a man thinks so is he, and, it may be added, so 
he believes his fruit to be. In selecting land for a 
fruit-farm, one must remember the true value 
of hillocks. A hillside is different, for an entire 
fruit region may be a hillside. 

I have reached the conclusion that in fruit- 
growing all cultivation should obey the advice 
of the old Greeks. "Much but not too much." 
But a Greek maxim, like Greek morals, must be 
taken in a Greek sense. Much but not too much 
is another way of saying "Enough." The test of 
the whole matter is simple : The tree is known by 
its fruit. In horticulture luxurious growth of 
wood-stock and abundant fruit mark "Enough." 
Any tree, vine, or shrub on a neglected fruit-farm 



The Cultivation of the Fruit- Farm 147 

will produce one apple, one plum, one bunch of 
grapes fit for the county fair, but does it produce 
fruit all of which you would enter for a premium? 
First prizes have been given for fruit culled from 
a neglected tree, and were the tree before the judges 
they would not award the prize. Some fruit- 
growers use packages with two faces: the upper, or 
top, for big bunches of grapes of fine quality; the 
lower, or bottom, for odds and ends, culls, even 
stones, leaves, and weeds. This means that culti- 
vation is on the surface, — at least of the basket. 
But the fruit-farm is more truly mirrored in the 
bottom of the basket. It is easier to cultivate 
the fruit-farm to quality and quantity than to 
cultivate the fruit-grower. There is that about 
horse-trading that affects the morals of the man 
and the appearance of the horse. Even a deacon 
deteriorates in the process. There is that also 
about fruit-growing which affects the fruit-grower; 
he may run to culls like his trees and vines. In- 
deed, it is somewhat of a strain on some men to be 
fruit-growers. Yet, happily, there are growers and 
growers. All do not neglect cultivation of their 
plantation; all do not raise a preponderance of 
culls, or top off the scraggly fruit with a thin layer 
of "selected fruit," as the label on the basket 
bravely, not to say effusively, informs the pur- 
chaser. It is a case of human nature; the fruit 
of the garden is no better than the gardener. You 
can read the character of the fruit-grower in the 
condition of his fruit -farm. 



148 An American Fruit-Farm 

There is difference of opinion as to the best 
cultivation of orchards: Shall they be kept in 
grass? Plowed, dragged, cultivated, sown to 
cover-crops, and treated like the vineyard? This 
means: Can the tree feed, grow, bear fruit of as 
good quality and of the same quantity in sod as in 
cultivated ground? My own experience favors 
cultivation. Feed the cherry tree and it will feed 
you. Now any tree can feed in sod ground, but 
can it get enough food to produce what we want it 
to produce? A tree in sod is not unlike one in the 
wild. By stirring the surface of the land you drain 
it, ventilate it, open up the pores, and accelerate 
the circulation of soluble plant-foods in the soil. 
Moreover, you by cultivation destroy innumerable 
enemies of the tree, as grubs, worms, even toxics 
in the soil which otherwise would feed on the tree 
to its injury. A hayfield is apparently a clean 
place, but a hayfield is a hayfield, not an orchard. 
Much of the virtue of fertilizers scattered over a 
hayfield vanishes, in air, into thin air. Plow your 
hayfield and the fertilizers get into the laboratory 
of the soil and are transformed into plant-food. A 
tree in a meadow gets "root-bound." Yet, let us 
not forget, we have set a standard, an artificial 
standard, for the fruit-tree. Not merely apples, 
pears, cherries, plums, but finest apples, pears, 
plums, and cherries, all pulp, and, if possible, seed- 
less or, at least, seeds little. Nature has her eyes on 
the apple seed; we have ours on the apple pulp. 
An apple tree in sod will grow apples ; one in culti- 





I^HIHHH 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 149 

vated soil will grow finer apples, by our standards. 
The cherry tree in sod tends to black bark and 
decaying limbs; the tree in cultivated soil tends to 
reddish bark, and tough, vigorous limbs. Each 
will fruit, but the larger, finer fruit will be found on 
the cultivated land. 

Orchard soil is made like vineyard soil or garden 
soil. Cover-crops, or stable manure, for nitrogen; 
potash for fruit: phosphoric acid for both; a soil 
as loose as ashes, and full of humus; these in your 
soil your orchard will grow healthy stock and fine, 
abundant fruit. And in winter, it is well if in your 
orchard the snow lies deep, and beneath the snow a 
thick matting of clover, vetch, grass, or chickweed. 
The time for cultivating the orchard is during the 
period of vigorous yearly growth, from opening 
spring when, as we say, the sap starts, till the 
fruit is ready to pick. Winter trimming, spring 
and early summer cultivation, winter covering, — 
and the cycle is completed. This is the orchard 
calendar. The more vigorous the growth of the 
tree, as the peach, the more cultivation and 
feeding are required. Not that any fruit-tree can 
live without food and care, but peach trees are 
rapid growers and heavy feeders, especially in their 
youth, — and wise management will keep them 
young. In the Lake Shore Valley they are always 
rapid growers and heavy feeders; in less degree are 
cherries, prunes, and apples, in the order named. 
Many fruit-growers plant the young orchard 
and then treat it like trees in the wild, — now and 



150 An American Fruit-Farm 

then, however, cutting out the underbrush, briers, 
and weeds. You can recognize these orchards (?) 
as you drive about the Valley. Perhaps such 
cultivated wilds may be found in other fruit 
sections of America, for it is not to be supposed 
that all the funny fruit-growers are concentrated in 
one Valley. It is true, though paradoxical, that 
these are the highest-priced orchards, just as 
neglected vineyards are always the highest-priced 
vineyards in the Valley. 

The more neglected the plantation, the higher is 
its true cost. The cheapest plantation is always 
the best one. In the cultivation of fruit, trees, 
shrub, and vine must be protected from enemies, 
as well as be trimmed and fed. These enemies are 
insects and fungi. Nature, the law of things and 
men, in a measure, looks out for her own and sees 
to it that every insect and fungus too shall have its 
enemy, fungus and insect feeding on insect and 
fungus. This is Nature's fine balancing which 
makes possible the perpetuation of each tree after 
its kind. For this end Nature does not find it 
necessary to exterminate every enemy of plant 
life, or animal life would vanish, including man 
himself. If the plant manages to reproduce itself 
by the maturity of a few seeds, and by their ger- 
mination and continued growth, the cycle of life 
is made complete. We as nature-mongers, as 
fruit-growers, are more exacting. We demand fruit 
of the kind that suits us and far more abundantly 
than does Nature, therefore insects and fungi are 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 151 

greater perils to our orchard than to Nature's 
wild trees. It is not enough for us that the apple 
or cherry tree merely fruits; it must fruit abun- 
dantly and of the quality we desire. Then, too, in 
concentrating the energy of the vine or tree upon 
some particular part, as pulp in cherry or prune, 
and liquid in grape, we disturb the balance of the 
plant's life and so weaken the plant against its 
enemies. The cherry tree which bears our best 
fruit, in the stern economy of Nature is a weakling, 
unable to withstand disease, and this cherished 
fruit invites insects and fungi in myriads. 

What must we do? 

We may so feed the tree that it grows and bears 
fruit in such quantity that, despite the ravages of 
insects and fungi, we have an abundance of perfect 
fruit left and the tree also survives. Or, we may 
destroy the enemy and save the fruit, also relieving 
the tree of its enemies. Our supreme purpose is to 
keep the tree healthy and to raise an abundance 
of perfect fruit of finest quality. A tree may be 
withered by fungus or eaten of insects and for a 
time seem healthy and able to resist the attacks, 
but at last it succumbs. To save it we poison the 
enemy without killing the tree or injuring the fruit. 
This is the purpose and the art of spraying. 

Now spraying is a preventive and a remedy, 
not a fertilizer; it is medicine for the sick, not food 
for the well. Like all medicine it disturbs the 
system. Usually medicine to the fruit-grower is no 
more than a stimulus to some organ or tissue of the 



152 An American Fruit- Farm 

body. Spray for the fruit-tree is a mixture which 
smothers, drowns, heats, chills, or, when taken as 
food by the insect or the fungus, poisons the enemy 
yet does not injure (at least seriously) the plant 
that is sprayed. 

The enemies of the fruit-farm attack root, bark, 
stock, leaf, bud, flower, and fruit, — that is, the 
whole plant, but rarely every part at one time. 
The rootworm strips the grape-root of bark in 
a spiral from end to end, beginning seemingly at 
the tip. For a few days it lies inert in transition 
from worm into larva when (about mid- June) it 
emerges as a beetle, deposits its eggs close to the 
ground beneath the loose bark of the vine-stock, 
climbs or flies to the leaf and begins its zigzag 
course of eating its way through life, marking the 
leaf as it moves. It flies from leaf to leaf and for a 
time enjoys quite a sociable life with its kind. It 
is very prolific. The deposit of eggs is not made 
directly it leaves the ground but at some time after 
it has flown about. It cuts the leaves into shreds. 
The leaf hopper sucks the leaf from the under side, 
leaving the whole vineyard as brown and sere as if 
a fire had passed through it. Fungi, or mildew, 
black rot, brown rot, grow on the fruit and absorb 
its juices. The rosebug eats the buds of the grape 
blossom, leaving the vineyard fruitless. The 
curculio lays its egg in the blossom of the apple, 
the cherry, the peach, the pear, the plum, and the 
worm feeds on the young fruit, poisoning, defacing, 
shrivelling it to a hard, skinny cover stretched over 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 153 

pit or seeds. The moth lays innumerable eggs 
which, hatching on leaf or bark, feed in armies, strip 
the orchard of its foliage, choke the trees and pre- 
clude all hope of fruit. The borer pierces the bark 
and kills stock and limb ; the scale shingles over the 
bark with its wretched shields, sucking up the sap, 
and leaving the tree as dead as if scorched by fire. 
So every plant known to the fruit-farm has its 
enemies. Not a tree or shrub, not a vine or root, 
not a tuber or leaf of any sort escapes, — no, not 
one. 

The fruit-grower is confronted by legions of ene- 
mies ready to swoop down upon his plantation and 
consume it from the face of the earth. As the 
country becomes more thickly settled, as forests are 
destroyed, prairies broken up, the vast wild made 
a habitation for man, insects and fungi, deprived 
of their feeding ground in the wild, have turned to 
our feeding ground, the cultivated field, to our 
wheat, our cotton, our orchards, our vineyards, 
our gardens. It would be presumptuous to attempt 
to catalogue these enemies. The Bulletins from 
the Experimental Station, State and National, and 
the innumerable books by experts trace the life 
history of these pests and tell how to combat 
them. It is an appalling task but it cannot be 
escaped. * 

•As an example of timely and practical contributions, see "Fall 
Manual of Practice in Economic Zoology, " Ohio Agricultural Experiment 
Station, Wooster, Ohio, IT. S. A., November, 191 1, Bulletin 233, 164 pp.; 
Index, vii. pp. Illustrated. This tells the fruit-grower the name, habits, 
ravages, and methods of destroying every insect, worm, grub, moth, 



154 An American Fruit-Farm 

Regions free from pernicious insects and fungi 
yesterday are infected to-day; those free to-day 
will be infected to-morrow. As the price of liberty 
is eternal vigilance, so the price of fruit is cease- 
less spraying. It must from henceforth be counted 
an essential part of fruit-growing. 

Now fruit-growing is not only special farming 
but itself breaks up in specialties. One must know 
his orchard and his vineyard. In spraying the rule 
is, Each tree after its kind. For this reason alone 
the fruit-grower should beware of many varieties as 
of grapes, and many kinds of fruit, in petty sec- 
tions, this of plums, that of peaches, a third of 

beetle, bug, borer, — whatsoever its character, — that injures the fruit- 
farm. Of similar value are "Important Insecticides: Directions for 
their Preparation and Use," Farmers' Bulletin No. 127, United States 
Department of Agriculture, by C. L. Marlatt, M.S., Washington, 
Government Printing Office, 1901; and "Insecticides and Fungicides: 
Chemical Composition and Effectiveness of Certain Preparations," 
Farmers' Bulletin, No. 146. By J. K. Haywood, Washington, Govern- 
ment Printing Office, 1902. These may be had for the asking. 

The Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station issues a "Spray Calendar," 
for the treatment of diseased conditions in plants, — a Bulletin for plant 
diseases and insect pests, prepared by W. J. Green, A. D. Selby, and 
P. J. Parrott. This sheet is of extraordinary practical value. It gives 
specific formulas for all fungicides, telling exactly how to prepare them 
and apply them; specifically states the seed or plant that is attacked by 
insect or fungus; for what it is treated; how to be treated; and an elabo- 
rate spray calendar for each plant, shrub, tree, vine, stating the exact 
time of successive applications of spray and how much to be used. 
There are also "remarks and cautions" for the benefit of the inexperi- 
enced. 

The fruit-grower will wisely correspond with, or at least secure these 
and like valuable publications from, whatsoever Experimental Stations 
are within his reach. Both the General Government and the State 
Governments now expend vast sums for the benefit of farmers whatever 
special branch of farming be pursued. 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 155 

apples, another of cherries. . Sixty acres of Mont- 
morenci cherries are far more valuable than sixty 
acres subdivided into small plantings of apples, 
currants, gooseberries, plums, peaches, and so on 
through the list. The care of an orchard of one 
kind of fruit differs from that of another kind. If 
all is of one kind, or if the fruit- farm is given over to 
subdivisions of respectable size, in different fruits, 
the administration is more economical and profit- 
able than many trees, plants, shrubs, vines of many 
kinds. The would-be fruit-grower is attracted by 
names, sounds, and memories of fruit he has seen 
in market or at fairs. Let him concentrate; let 
him specialize. Avoid bewildering varieties. They 
are wholly unprofitable and multiply the evils of 
farming. If he has secured land within the proper 
climatic belt he may securely specialize in fruit- 
raising. 

The Lake Shore Valley is adapted to grapes, 
cherries, peaches, prunes, plums, apples, berries 
of all kinds, currants, melons, and some add English 
walnuts; yet it is not a profitable apple country 
because of the winds which sweep down from Lake 
Superior, two thousand miles away, across the 
continent, and play havoc with the apples. There 
are apple sections in America where destructive 
winds do not break through and tumble the fruit 
prematurely to the ground. Yet there are profit- 
able apple orchards in the Valley. One must 
assume a wind-risk there if he attempts to raise 
apples. It is not a pear country, though thousands 



156 An American Fruit- Farm 

of bushels of pears are raised. The trees grow 
luxuriantly, blossom freely, and set abundantly for 
fruit; suddenly the blight burns the foliage to a 
crisp. The scale too affects the pear. When 
the blight can be prevented, — the scale can now be 
successfully treated by spraying, — the Valley will 
become one of the most profitable pear sections 
in the country. The fruit-grower must move 
along the line of least resistance; hence he must 
raise fruit best in quality, greatest in quantity, 
and with least possible labor. This means that 
he must utilize the privileges of climate by utiliz- 
ing all means and methods of fruit-raising known to 
experience. I believe that the Valley, — or any 
other fruit section, — can be made to be the profit- 
able home of all fruit possible to its climate. The 
problem is for the fruit-grower himself to solve. 

Of enemies of the plum and the prune the name 
is legion and the list lengthening every year. 
Black knot, scale, curculio, brown rot (fungus), 
and other enemies swarm down upon trees of this 
family. Bordeaux mixture holds the fungi in 
check; shaking the tree brings down the curculio; 
the scale must be killed by spraying; moths and 
insects generally can be routed also with the 
sprayer. It is not a difficult task. Pruning of the 
tree seems to increase its power to resist disease. 
But too many plum trees of mixed varieties are like 
an overcrowded hospital. No one in the Valley 
need fear to attempt a plum or prune orchard 
because of its insect or fungi enemies; the spray 



The Cultivation of the Fruit- Farm 157 

bulletins and calendar and the active, resolute, 
sensible man will speedily rout them. 

Peaches like plums invite enemies, and of a 
different sort, — yellows, curl-leaf, root-gall, and of 
course the borer, the fungi that cause rot of tree 
and fruit and some obscure diseases of which as yet 
we know practically nothing. Despite these dis- 
couragements, peaches are raised with profit in 
the Valley. But as yet spraying peach trees is 
somewhat uncommon there. He who sprays has 
fine peaches and many. The freezing and thawing 
of the soil undoes the peach tree, but this fatality 
may easily be avoided by proper management of 
the soil, — winter protection by cover-crops, and 
vigorous feeding of the tree. Peach trees are 
beneficiaries or victims of climate, but oftener, are 
victims of the fruit-grower's neglect. Peach cul- 
ture is bound to confine itself to what may be 
called the natural peach regions of the country, of 
which the Valley is one. 

Sour cherries are less liable than sweet cherries to 
disease and to insect and fungi pests. Mildew, 
brown rot, the curculio, the slug, the borer, partly 
exhaust the list. These attack all cherry trees, 
sweet or sour. But remedies are known, are 
available and the fruit-grower need not fear to 
undertake cherry culture provided he is clearly 
within the climatic cherry-belt. Follow the borer 
with a wire; Paris green kills the slugs, — and men 
also if carelessly handled; the Bordeaux mixture 
checks the ravages of most cherry enemies. The 



158 An American Fruit-Farm 

trees, notably the sour varieties, are not subject 
to scale. But the tree is a particular plant and will 
not fruit everywhere in the Valley, as along the 
crest of the hills near the frost line. Here it is 
only a shade-tree. The Valley is however a cherry 
section even though a small one. 

The diseases of the grapevine yield to culti- 
vation and spraying. The fungi, but not all 
insects, are killed by the Bordeaux mixture. The 
rootworm must be attacked with spray above 
and cultivation below. The arsenical preparation 
is effective, but the stirring of the ground as the 
rootworm emerges, or transforms itself into a 
beetle, — while yet in the larva state is his most 
certain destruction. A time comes in June when 
this change is made, when the larva is slowly work- 
ing its way from earth to air, — a small, white, 
viscid, wriggling creature, shaping into a beetle. 
Sun, wind, or disturbance of the earth destroys it. 
Therefore cultivate thoroughly at this time. The 
birds will help, — if you have birds; possibly 
they have been exterminated by pot-hunters and 
idle boys. Perhaps you kill birds! If so, you 
deserve the rootworm! A patient file of educated 
hens greatly helps at this juncture. So spray for 
the beetle; horse-hoe, away from the vines, for the 
larvae ; you will have your reward. In the Valley, 
so persistent and thorough has been the campaign 
against the rootworm, it no longer gives the 
fruit-grower anxiety. 

Of far greater peril is the thrip, or leaf hopper, a 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 159 

small white moth which sucks the life out of the leaf 
of the vine. Happily this destructive insect, which, 
unchecked, will transform a vineyard into a ruin of 
seemingly fire-swept rows, with withered grapes, 
is completely destroyed by the Bordeaux mixture 
with nicotine added in small quantity. Its ravages 
are no longer feared. 

The composition of spraying material for various 
specific purposes and the machine that shall be used 
sooner or later compel the fruit-grower's attention. 
The preparation of the spray; the ingredients, 
the particular application, and the proper time of 
spraying are adequately set forth in the Bulletins 
to which I have already referred. The selection 
of a machine is a matter of some difficulty. The 
qualities desired in a machine are efficiency and 
cheapness, but as yet no machine is inexpensive, 
and all are not effective. The types on the mar- 
ket are run by horse-power engendered by the mo- 
tion of the wheels of the sprayer, or by steam power, 
or gasoline power producing steam. Either coal 
or gasoline is preferable to horse-power and the 
steam-power machines work when the machine is 
stationary as it must be for the spraying of trees, 
or when the team is drawing the machine along the 
rows of trees or vines. The fluid must be ejected 
as finest mist or spray and must thoroughly drench 
the plant. While spraying is a labor, it is not, with 
the best type of power machine, a prohibitive 
labor. So far as I know there is not on the market 
a machine which is first-class in every particular — 



160 An American Fruit-Farm 

that is, thoroughly made, material strong, and whole 
equipment durable. Spraying machines are made 
to sell to farmers at a profit. Yet we cannot get 
along without them. They are certain to be im- 
proved, to be made more durable, more effective, 
and to sell at a price proportioned to their strength 
and efficiency. 1 

1 Considering fruit-culture in all its aspects, for the Valley, spraying 
resolves itself chiefly into a timely application of three kinds of spray: 

The Bordeaux Mixture: 
Copper sulphate (blue vitriol), 4 lbs. 
Quicklime (not air slaked), 4 lbs. 
Water to make 50 gallons; 

or, if too strong, all the water and half the other ingredients. The 

mixture must be used fresh. 

Arsenate of Lead: 
Arsenate of soda, 4 oz. 
Acetate of lead, 1 1 oz. 
Water, 16 gallons. 
This is sometimes called Disparene and may be had commercially. 

Nicotine Solution for Leaf Hopper: 
Water, 100 gallons, 
Nicotine, 1 pint. 
This is an irritant, deadly poison and must be handled carefully. 

Lime, Sulphur and Salt: 
Stone lime, 15 to 30 lbs. 
Flowers of sulphur, 15 lbs. 
Water, 50 gallons. 
Specific for scale. 

The making of these mixtures requires an adequate equipment: an 
ample supply of water; facilities for heating any of the ingredients, 
and for complete intermixture of them. The Bulletins and "Spray 
Calendar" already cited, or similar authorities, should be consulted. The 
beginner may profitably examine some working spraying equipment 
before undertaking this part of fruit-farming. There are now some 
twenty-five specific preparations used in spraying; the three given above 
are the most widely used and may be called standard. In all mixtures 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 161 

That there has been a depletion of the soil under 
fruit-culture cannot be doubted. The wonder is 
that the land produces as heavily as it does. We 
have no exact record of the amount of soil-exhaus- 
tion, we only know that the growth of wood in the 
vineyards is not so great as it was twenty years 
ago, and that many vineyards have fallen off 
heavily in production. We know also that the 
Erie Valley is naturally a region for grapes. 1 Only 
one conclusion can be drawn: that of soil depletion. 
This is true of all American fruit valleys. Com- 
plaint is made of destructive insects and fungi, of 
late years, — an enemy that proves weakening of 
stock. Two resources are available: feeding the 
soil, and its cultivation. Since the introduction 
of grape-culture in 1855, the Valley has not known 
a failure of the grape crop. Few sections of the 
country have made such a record. In the Valley, 
during that time, other crops have failed. The 
steady service of the Concord grape is quite with- 
out parallel in horticulture. Vineyards fairly 
planted, not as wisely as we would now plant 
them, have for upwards of thirty years averaged a 



the lime is added to prevent burning of foliage. In combination with 
the Bordeaux mixture Paris green may be used at the rate of one pound 
to 175-200 gallons. The whole subject of combinations of chemicals 
and ingredients generally as fungicides and insecticides requires par- 
ticular care and special Bulletins, or treatises should be consulted. 
Professor Bailey's Principles of Fruit-Growing, and The Spraying of 
Plants, by E. G. Lodeman, edited by Bailey, are invaluable to every 
fruit-grower. 

1 The grape crop, alone, of the Lake Erie Valley, — the Lake Erie- 
Chautauqua Grape Belt, for 1914, sold for $2,607,415. 



1 62 An American Fruit- Farm 

gross product of from eighty to one hundred and 
fifty dollars per acre. This income, year after year, 
may be set against the larger but less dependable 
income from berries and orchards of from two 
hundred and fifty to six hundred dollars per acre. 
These are extraordinary returns. But all land in 
the Valley is not adapted to berries, to orchard, or 
to currants. The climate encourages all the fruits I 
have mentioned; therefore the problem rests wholly 
with the fruit-grower whether they shall be raised. 
The making of the soil and the cultivation of the 
fruit are his problem. Cultivation includes drain- 
age, spraying, trimming, and fertilization. But if 
all these be attended to and cultivation be omitted, 
there can be no crop. 

The care of the fruit -plantation is both an art 
and an instinct. Instinct ranks first. Let no man 
attempt fruit-farming who does not like it. Let 
him not be tempted by reports of large financial 
returns. He will be disappointed. In fruit-grow- 
ing Pope's famous line seems true: 

" Man never is but always to be blest." 

Let him who likes horticulture, and who has 
symptoms of moderate capacity for success, not 
hesitate to attempt it ; some succeed ; many fail, as 
in every other vocation. Experience alone breeds 
the fruit-farmer. If you trim cherry trees as peach 
trees, you will not raise cherries. If you get your 
spray solution too strong, you will burn your foliage. 
All sprays are water and something, and the " some- 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 163 

thing" is a poison — poisonous to the plant that 
receives, to the grower who grows, and to the eater 
who eats, unless properly applied. While we 
must handle poisons as it were with gloves, we must 
always mix them with common sense. Here we 
cannot safely go by rule of thumb, but by scale, 
weight, and measure. Never entrust the prepa- 
ration of the spray to an inexperienced hand and 
trust to luck. The fruit-grower himself is the 
responsible man and must know how to prepare the 
spray, how to apply it, and what results to expect. 
He must of course be able to decide what sort of 
spray is particularly needed. So too must he be 
present, at least constructively, when orchards and 
vineyards are planted, trimmed, and cultivated. 
There must be no work of any kind on the place 
that he does not understand how to do, and prefer- 
ably can himself do if necessary. That valiant 
heathen, Cato the Censor, wrote more than two 
thousand years ago the first principle of sound 
farming' 

"The face of the master is good for the land." 

In fruit-farming, "The hireling flees because he is a 
hireling. " There may be exceptions, but they are 
always on some other fruit-farm than yours or 
mine. 

While "book-farming" is still held in contempt 
by most farmers, it has in late years come into 
respectability by sheer evidence of value. We do 
not condemn medical schools, law schools, schools 



164 An American Fruit-Farm 

of engineering, nor do we longer condemn agri- 
cultural schools or experimental stations. Even 
some seeds sent out by Congressmen actually 
grow. We are discovering that the plain, every- 
day, bread-winning farmer cannot afford to make 
horticultural experiments, even were he so inclined. 
The State must experiment for the general welfare. 
This it does at the Agricultural Station. The 
results are printed and distributed free to all. 
This is not mere "book-farming" but scientific 
farming; it is based upon experience. But other 
people's experience in horticulture, whether told 
by lip or by the printed page, counts for little with 
most fruit-growers. He is successful, if at all, 
after many clostly blunders, most of which he 
might have avoided. The serious aspect of a 
blunder in fruit-farming is the difficulty of correct- 
ing it to the advantage of the corrector. It takes 
many years to get a fruit-farm in perfection, — if 
that stage can ever be reached. Few can afford to 
lose fifteen or twenty years by a blunder in setting 
out the wrong varieties, or planting a section to 
the wrong fruit. The supreme knowledge for the 
fruit-grower is how to raise fruit. This means 
knowledge of climate, of soil-making, of soil-feeding, 
of setting out the fruit -farm, and of caring for it 
when set out. 

The fruit-grower is constantly confronted by 
difficulties, even by obstacles in the form of prob- 
lems of soil-making, of selection of varieties, of 
cultivation, trimming, spraying, new enemies in 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 165 

insects and fungi, new tools, market risks, trans- 
portation, and the like. The list is of indefinite 
length. No agricultural station runs his fruit- 
farm, he cannot always obtain specific answers to 
his inquiries; he must rely upon himself. To 
many of his questions no satisfactory answer can 
as yet be given. They have not been worked out. 
That we are reaching a higher plane of fruit- 
raising is indicated by the increased efficiency of 
every department of horticultural effort; we are 
becoming scientific by grinding necessity. Legis- 
latures make increasingly large appropriations for 
the investigation and treatment of every agricultur- 
al question, and, as never before in human history, 
farming in every branch is becoming an exact 
science. The agricultural schools do as much for 
the farmer as the law schools for the lawyer, the 
medical schools for the doctor, and the engineering 
schools for the engineer. Yet these agricultural 
schools are not and cannot be the equivalent of 
experience on the fruit-farm. The man who runs 
a fruit-farm wholly according to bulletins of 
Agricultural Stations, will cultivate, as Pliny said 
centuries ago, "in the very highest style" but "in 
mere extravagance," or, as Cato puts it, he will 
have a farm "with the spending habit" and "not 
much will be left over." In brief there are two 
ways to run a fruit-farm: keep a bank account in 
order to run a fruit-farm, or a fruit-farm in order 
to have a bank account. No farm is faultless; no 
orchard, vineyard, or section given to whatever 



1 66 An American Fruit-Farm 

plant, but some poor plants are there. The 
accumulated experience of the neighborhood, of 
other sections of country, and notably your own ex- 
perience — usually very expensive — taken together 
with the wisdom of bulletins and reports from 
Agricultural Stations, contribute toward a closer 
realization of the perfect fruit-farm. 

This all means that the fruit-grower to-day has 
access to aids and facilities in his vocation hitherto 
unknown. Fruit-raising is a science, a branch of 
chemistry, just as chemistry itself is an aspect of 
Nature, — a peep into her operations which we dub 
with a technical word. Countless millions of dol- 
lars are now capitalized in fruit-farms and related 
interests. We try to do precisely what Hesiod 
and Varro and Cato of old, and all horticulturists 
and farmers since their day have tried to do, and 
we do much as they did. There are no more bones 
in the human body than in the days of ^scula- 
pius or Galen; no more ingredients of fertile soil 
than when Cato was farming at Tusculum. The 
names of common diseases may be found in medical 
books four hundred years old. But while the 
names are identical, both surgery and medicine 
are more scientific now than then. Horticulture 
too has become scientific. We know very little 
about raising fruit as compared with the unknown, 
and we are working out knowledge all the time by 
experiment as well as by experience. For example : 
Cato advises to "manure pastures in early spring 
in the dark of the moon, when the west wind begins 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 167 

to blow." This strongly reminds us of advice we 
still hear about sowing beans in the new moon, till 
we learn that the shifting of the wind from out the 
west, on the Roman Campagna, and of course at 
Tusculum, marked with remarkable precision the 
shifting of the season. The wind makes, as it 
were, a "spray" or "fertilizer" calendar for the 
region. Cato dealt wholly with slaves, totally 
ignorant of letters, — creatures who, however cap- 
able as laborers, were guided by sight and sounds 
in Nature. A slave, were he the trusted overseer, 
would know "when the west wind begins to blow," 
just as by the color of the olive he would know 
when to pick the fruit for the oil-press. Our 
science of farming, worked out by retort and cru- 
cible and chemical test, agrees with the large 
conclusions of simple experience, — as "when the 
west wind blows" it is time to do a particu- 
lar work. Nature herself is a great clock, and 
her hands point to the hours when things must 
be done opportunely. But Cato also prescribes 
for a sick ox: he should be given a raw hen's egg 
immediately; next day, a measure of wine from 
a wooden bowl in which the head of an onion has 
been scraped, and "both the ox and his atten- 
dant should do these things fasting and standing 
upright. " 

If a bone is dislocated [continues Cato] it can be made 
sound by this incantation: Take a green reed four or five 
feet long, cut it in the middle and let two men hold the 
pieces against your hips. Begin then to chant as follows: 



168 An American Fruit-Farm 

In Alio. S. F Motas 

Vaeta, 

Daries Dardaries Astataries Disunapiter, 

and continue until the free ends of the reed are brought 
slowly together in front of you. Meanwhile, wave a knife 
above the reeds, and when they come together and one 
touches the other, seize them in your hand and cut them 
right and left. These pieces of reed bound upon a dis- 
located or fractured bone will cure it. But every day, 
repeat the incantation, or in place of it this one : 

Huat Hanat Huat 
Ista Pista Sista 
Domiabo Damnaustra. 

This you promptly say is nonsense and superstition, 
but turning to another bit of advice from Cato, you 
will discover that he tells you precisely how to 
plant and care for an olive orchard, how to make a 
bake-oven, how to raise figs, how to manage old 
vines, how to feed stock in winter, how to make, 
store, and when to sell olive oil, how to make bread 
and to cure hams, how to manage chickens and 
ducks, how to make wine, and to remove any 
unpleasant odor from it, how to select a farm, 
how to drain land, and what are the duties of the 
overseer. This all sounds modern. The matter is 
well put by Fairfax Harrison: "On questions of 
preventing malady, he had the wisdom of experi- 
ence, but malady once arrived, he was a simple 
pagan." 

What would we think of the fruit-farmer who, 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 169 

instead of keeping the team moving in cultivation 
of his land, spring and summer, should cut three 
green wythes, cross them over his little finger, take 
his stand at the corner of his vineyard and chant: 

Eeney, meeney, meiny, mo, 
Ikery, eikery, tinkery, toe, 
Concord, Cherry, Peaches grow ! 

His wife (if he was so fortunate as to have one) 
would promptly send him to a lunatic asylum, and 
hire some sane man to run the farm. 

We know as yet comparatively little about the 
mysteries of raising fruit, — soil-making, planting, 
plant-feeding, — and have much to learn about 
cultivation; therefore we turn eagerly to every 
service of agricultural school, experimental station, 
or actual experience however acquired. All as- 
sociations of fruit-growers for exchange of ideas 
contribute to the general welfare, — local, county 
and State societies, which, as now conducted, 
bring together experts in every branch of horti- 
culture, and thus extend the benefits of experience. 

He who would raise fruit will soon learn by 
experience that fruit-growers, as a class, are men 
fixed in their traditions, jealous of association, 
and almost immovable in their individualism. 
Practically it will be extraordinary that fruit-grow- 
ers of their own motion in any specialty unite and 
long cooperate to any end. They tie ropes of sand 
when they bind themselves to cooperation. They 
complain bitterly of excessive freight-rates, of 



170 An American Fruit-Farm 

dishonest commission men, of high cost of labor, 
of low prices and poor markets for fruit, of wind 
and weather, of man, beast, and corporations. If 
you decide to become a fruit-grower and come into 
the land a stranger, or, being acquainted, or even 
to the manor born, are an innovator, you are 
looked upon somewhat askance, — not wholly with 
enmity, but with a delicately tempered derision. 
When the college president turns politician, the 
bosses 

"First loathe, then pity, then embrace." 

So too when the man turns fruit-grower, the very 
old cherry trees nod their heads and wink their eyes 
and wrinkle the very toes of their roots, but gladly 
take the food the new master gives them and prick 
up their leaves and take on a new lease of life. 
The newcomer will find kind neighbors, but none 
who quite share with his vivid ideas of improve- 
ments. Fruit-farming has one traditional motto: 

In statu quo, 

which freely translated means, 

As it was, is, and ever shall be. 

The only incentive here is greater profit. Will it 
pay? I have never known a fruit-grower who 
deliberately declined an additional dollar of profit. 
If he sees that improved cultivation will produce 
the dollar, he will improve his cultivation. The 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 171 

neglected vineyards and orchards, in all fruit 
sections, belong to blind, deaf, and unreasoning 
men: for none are so blind as they who will not see. 
He may say that he sees, but he is merely repeating 
words he does not comprehend. 

In our day the isolation and individualism of the 
farmer are vanishing; he is affected, as never 
before, by the world at large. Railroads, trolleys, 
motors bring fruit-growers into association. See- 
ing is becoming believing, and the presence of a 
well-managed estate in a fruit section works better- 
ment of the whole region. Thorough cultivation 
tells its own story. No fruit-grower now lives far 
from the market; it is measured by accessibility, 
not by intervening miles. Necessity makes farm 
and market neighbors. Even if the market be a 
thousand miles from the farm it is no farther than 
the time taken to reach it and the cost of transpor- 
tation. In the Lake Shore Valley the fruit-grower 
picks cherries, say a hundred or more bushels 
a day during the cherry season. Every afternoon 
at 3 o'clock he ships to New York; at 6 o'clock, to 
Pittsburgh. At 7 o'clock next morning his fruit 
is selling in these markets; by noon he has tele- 
graphic returns. This means reduction of distance 
to lowest terms; it means more than this, — more 
cherries, better fruit, both on the farm and in the 
market; the grower better satisfied, the consumer 
too than ever before. It means a more careful 
selection of varieties; a closer study of the soil; 
a more thorough cultivation of the orchard. It 



172 An American Fruit-Farm 

means systematic and profitable farm manage- 
ment ; a larger body of laborers, better wages, best 
type of packages, and highest profits possible. 
Not merely a bank account but a real fruit-farm; 
and a bank account because there is a fruit-farm. 
Sifted to real substance, it means raising cherries, 
and that depends upon cultivation. Feed the 
orchard and the orchard will feed you; care 
for the vineyard and the vineyard will care for 
you. 

Thus the fruit-farmer now touches elbows with 
the rest of the world. He finds the whole in the 
soil beneath his feet. The world looks for cherries 
in the cherry tree, but the fruit-grower knows that 
he must first raise them in the soil and then culti- 
vate them out of it. He must be ever in active 
copartnership with four associates: 

Nitrogen, Potash, Phosphoric Acid, and Humus, 

but his partners are helpless unless he drains the 
earth in which they work. He must drain top and 
bottom, and he must keep his partners busy. He 
makes his soil and it makes fruit for him. He trims, 
sprays, cultivates; he blankets the ground with a 
soil-feeding crop; he keeps it like an ash heap and 
filled with humus. Having climate on his side, 
his fruit-farm conveniently located, accessible, a 
well-made and a well-managed machine, an operat- 
ing, chemical laboratory; his mind open to ideas 
from every quarter, — neighbors, journals, books, 
experiment stations, and he himself does a little 



The Cultivation of the Fruit-Farm 173 

thinking on his own account, — he will succeed in 
growing fruit in abundance, and the world will 
demand his fruit. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

I select a few available publications of practical value in the matter 
suggested by their titles; similar publications are issued by other Ex- 
perimental Stations, in various parts of the United States. 

"Report on Tent Caterpillars." M. V. Slingerland, Bulletin 170, 
Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station, Ithaca, N. Y. 

" The Codlin Moth." Bulletin 160, Ohio Agricultural Station, Wooster, 
Ohio. 

"The Palmer Worm." M. V. Slingerland, Bulletin 187, Cornell. 

"Notes upon Plums for Western New York." S. D. Welland, L. H. 
Bailey, Bulletin 131, Cornell. * 

"Treatment of Leaf-Spot in Plum and Cherry Orchards in 1896." 
S. A. Beach, Bulletin 117, New York Agricultural Experimental 
Station, Geneva, N. Y. 

" Soybeans and Cowpeas. " Bulletin 237, Wooster. 

"Maintenance of Soil Fertility." Circular 120, Wooster. 

Circular 131, Wooster. 

"The Maintenance of Fertility. " Bulletin 182, Wooster. 

"Soil Depletion in Respect of the Care of Fruit Trees. " I. P. Roberts, 
Bulletin 103, Cornell. 

"The Liming of Soils." Bulletin 159, Wooster. 

H. J. Wheeler, R. I. Agricultural Experimental Station, Wash- 
ington, Government Printing Office. 

"The Maintenance of Soil." Bulletin 141, Wooster. 

"Fall and Early Winter Injuries to Orchard Trees and Shrubbery by 
Freezing." Bulletin 192, Wooster. 

" Peaches for Home and Market. " Bulletin 170, Wooster. 

"Varieties of Strawberries." Bulletin 154, Wooster. 

"Strawberry Notes, 1910-11." Bulletin 236, Wooster. 

"Varieties of Strawberries and Raspberries." Bulletin 146, Wooster. 

"Orchard Culture." Bulletin 171, Wooster. 

"Orchard Practice: Starting an Apple Orchard." W. J. Green, 
Circular 108, Wooster. 

"Pollination in Orchards." S. W. Fletcher, Bulletin 181, Cornell. 

"Spraying Apples." Bulletin 191, Wooster. 

" Spraying for Fruit Diseases. " B. T. Galloway, Bulletin 38, Wash- 
ington, D. C. 

" Spraying Experiments against the Grape Leaf Hopper in the Lake 



174 An American Fruit-Farm 

Erie Valley." Fred Johnson, Bulletin 97, Pt. I., Washington, 

D.C. 

Johnson, Bulletin 116, Pt. I., Washington, D. C. 

" Spraying Machinery. " Bulletin 216, Wooster. 

"Spraying Machines and Accessories. " Bulletin 248, Wooster. 

"The Regeneration of Orchards." Bulletin 124, Wooster. 

"Seed and Soil Treatment and Spray Calendar, for Insect Pests and 

Plant Diseases." (Very valuable.) Bulletin 147, Wooster. 
The Grape Root-worm, with Special Reference to Investigations in the Erie 

Grape Belt (Lake Erie Valley), 1907-1909. (Illustrated; very 

elaborate.) Fred Johnson, A. G. Hammar, Washington, D. C. 
Grape Growing in the South. S. M. Tracy, Mississippi Agricultural 

Station, Washington, Government Printing Office. 
"Principal Insect Enemies of the Grape." C. L. Marlatt, Bulletin 

70, Washington, D. C. 
"The Grapevine Flea Beetle." M. V. Slingerland, Bulletin 223, 

Cornell. 
A New Grape Enemy: The Grape Blossom-Bud Gnat. Fred Johnson, 

Washington, D. C. 
" Self -Fertility of the Grape." S. A. Beach, Bulletin 157, Geneva, N.Y. 
"Fertilizing Self-Sterile Grapes." S. A. Beach, Bulletin 169, Geneva, 

N. Y. 
"Experiments in Ringing Grapes. " W. Paddock, Bulletin 151, Geneva, 

N.Y. 
Fertilizers. (A most valuable treatise.) Edward B. Voorhees, (late) 

Director of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Stations, and 

Professor of Agriculture in Rutgers College. The Macmillan Com- 
pany. 
Cyclopedia of American Horticulture. 4 vols. (Illustrated.) L. H. 

Bailey. Macmillan. 
The Fertility of the Land. I. P. Roberts, Macmillan. 
The Soil. F. H. King. Macmillan. 
Irrigation and Drainage. F. H. King. Macmillan. 
The Horticulturist's Rule Book. L. H. Bailey. Macmillan. 



VI 



FEEDING THE LAND 



AS all land is rock, more or less broken up, 
pulverized, moistened by water and impreg- 
nated with what the chemists call "the elements, " 
evidently, productive soil is plant-food stored in 
available form. Pure rock, solid or pulverized, 
cannot be called soil, yet a heap of sand, saturated 
with plant-food in liquid or gaseous form, will sup- 
port plant life. This means that while man cannot 
make rock he can make or assemble soil. The 
process is simple enough in theory: to mix any 
earth with plant-food, such as may be needed. 
Nature is carrying on this process all the time. 
Heat, motion, electrical force (whatever that may 
be), break up the rock. Geological change, move- 
ments of water, ice (the glacial action), subsidence, 
rise of strata, the indescribable cataclysms of past 
ages, have transformed rock into earth and earth 
into soil. We cannot account for the elements. 
Mingling and commingling, they make life on the 
globe possible. The wisest thing we can do is to 
imitate nature. The process, in so far as we are 

175 



176 An American Fruit-Farm 

co-workers, is physical. The great object with us 
is to get humus in the earth, — decaying vegetable 
matter in abundance. In other words, in order to 
have live plants, we must fill the earth beneath our 
feet with dead and decaying plants. The tree of a 
century's growth crashes to the earth in a tempest 
and, decaying, feeds a greedy vegetation, till it in 
various form matures, drops in death to the ground, 
decays, and feeds another round of plant life. The 
transformation of the dead and decaying oak into 
the wild vine, the dogwood, the artichoke, the 
hibiscus, the anemone, is a chemical, not a mere 
physical process. We cannot explain it. We 
witness the phenomenon and imitate it in orchard, 
vineyard, and field. 

Soil for food purposes, — human food, — is no 
longer in the state of nature. The cultivated 
differs from the wild soil in degree rather than 
in kind. The wild soil is not so productive as the 
cultivated; the drain upon it to support plant life 
is less. This drain is dual: partly for the plant 
itself, the stock; partly for the fruit. The food 
for the stock is not the food for the fruit. In 
a wild state the plant stock gets more food than 
does the fruit. Our chief purpose in fruit-grow- 
ing is fruit, not stock or foliage. In a wild 
state, the purpose appears to be the propaga- 
tion, the continuation of plants, each after its kind. 
Nature does not raise fruit for market. We grow 
the fruit as it were at the expense of the plant; 
Nature grows fruit solely to perpetuate the kind 



Feeding the Land 177 

of plant. Contrast the wild grape, or cherry, 
with the cultivated; the fox-grape with the Dela- 
ware; the black cherry of the woods with the 
Montmorenci or Morello or Tartarian of the 
orchard. We seek quantity and quality; Nature 
is satisfied with a fruit that will reproduce itself, 
irrespective of quality or quantity. She has 
done her perfect work when she has matured 
a seed that will grow and that actually does 
grow. 

In brief, we use the land by converting it into 
soil that will produce plant or fruit (stem, leaf, 
root, berry, nut, seed, tuber, or pulp) finer in 
quality, larger, more abundant in quantity than 
will the wild soil. This means that fruit-growing 
is an artificial procedure. On one acre of culti- 
vated soil we produce many times as much as will 
grow, in a state of nature, on wild soil. Therefore 
the supreme problem with us is how to make soil. 
We cannot change climate, but we can change, we 
can make, soil. Climate, soil, and the man make 
the fruit-farm. Given a climate which permits 
a plant to grow, man by manipulating the soil may 
bring the plant to what he calls a "state of perfec- 
tion" — -that is, to a quality and a quantity desired 
by him as food. In this process he may greatly, 
modify, and usually does modify, the original plant, 
even to sterility of fruit-seed, and to gross abnormal- 
ity of plant stock. The supreme purpose is the 
production of food; or, viewed as truly from 
another angle, the supreme labor is the assem- 



178 An American Fruit-Farm 

bling of a soil and its constant use, care, and 
cultivation. 

Stupid indeed is the would-be fruit-grower who 
ignores the soil, neglects cultivation, and yet expects 
fruit. He leaves the land wild yet demands fruit 
possible only from highly cultivated soil. As the 
supreme purpose in fruit-growing is fruit, the su- 
preme rule is to do the things that end in fruit. 
Climate fixes the site of the fruit-farm. This 
site is never undrainable land, unless one intends 
to raise aquatic fruit, such as fish, ducks, or geese. 
A plant has two periods, ever in succession during 
the life of the plant: one of activity; one of repose. 
Its active period is the fruit-grower's opportunity. 
During this growing period, and then only, can it 
feed, assimilating food of such kind and in such 
quantity as shall produce leaf, stem, flower, root, 
tuber, seed, or pulp desired for food. Nor can the 
period of the growth be changed: there is a time, a 
limited, defined time in the year, during which the 
plant grows, if it grows at all. Spring and early 
summer are the period. The plant starts vigor- 
ously in spring but gradually ceases growth that 
fruit may mature and the plant be ready to renew 
activity another spring. This means that the 
plant is capable of feeding and growing only during 
a brief part of the year and, indeed, a brief part of 
its own life. Unlike an animal, a plant feeds 
continuously part of the year and rests the re- 
mainder. I mean, of course, plants of the temperate 
zone. For instance, no fruit plant cultivated in 



Feeding the Land 179 

the open in the United States, such as peach, 
apple, cherry, grape, currant, or berry, grows the 
year round. That the plant while in a seemingly 
inactive state, as in winter, continues vital func- 
tions, there is no doubt. We do not yet under- 
stand them. Disturb these functions on a winter's 
day and the plant perishes as quickly as when they 
are disturbed in summer. 

During the brief growing-period of the plant we 
make soil for its benefit, — or, more correctly speak- 
ing, make the food for the plant available in the 
soil. We cannot do this in winter or late autumn; 
we must feed it in spring or summer when it will 
take food ; in spring rather than in summer because 
it then feeds most vigorously. Plainly then it is 
the fruit-grower who feeds his plants, he who 
makes his fruit. Begin as soon as the weather 
permits to feed your plantation. This means 
having your plant-food ready for the plant as soon 
as it awakens from its winter rest and begins to 
feed. This plant-food is not needed in the barn, or 
the packing-house, or on the truck wagon, but in 
the soil in available form. Plants have roots; 
roots and cells wonderfully organized and associ- 
ated as it were lengthwise, beneath the skin or bark 
of the root. These cells have thin walls, which, if 
alive, have the power of absorbing moisture or gas. 
If this moisture is food, the roots take it up by a 
process known as absorption (endosmosis) , new 
cells form, the plant grows; for a plant in earth 
below or air above is an assemblage of cells. When 



180 An American Fruit-Farm 

spring opens and the feeding process is active again 
(it doubtless goes on less actively during the winter), 
if food is available, the plant fattens fast. But 
this plant-food must be in liquid or gaseous form, 
for the plant-cell cannot absorb solid matter. It is 
the food already in the soil when spring opens that 
feeds the plant; therefore it is the food which the 
fruit-grower has made available long before the 
feeding process begins. 

It is, as it were, food stored in the soil that feeds 
orchard and vineyard this year; for this year and 
next, and years afterward, do we reap the benefit 
of feeding the soil last year and years before. We 
feed the soil to-day that it may feed the plant 
to-morrow. How long will it take the plant-food 
you scatter on the ground to become available to 
the plant? Just as long as may be required to 
make this food supply soluble, — provided it really 
is plant-food. Iron is an ingredient of wood, but 
we do not fertilize an apple orchard with nails. 
The whole problem of soil-making is a problem of 
available, soluble plant-food. How long does it 
take a fertilizer to dissolve into invisible moisture 
and gas? If you can tell, then you know accur- 
ately when the fertilizer you apply to the land in 
form of ashes, lime, salts, barnyard manure, a 
green crop plowed in as clover, turnips, vetch, 
soybeans, grass, or weeds, will be fit to feed the 
plant. We can give a general answer: It will take 
as long as may be necessary for the fertilizer to 
become fluid or gas, and this is a chemical process 



Feeding the Land 181 

within the laboratory of the soil. Heat and mois- 
ture are chief agents in this process. The sun really 
does the business. As well feed ingots of steel to a 
plant as an insoluble fertilizer. In perfectly cold, 
dry earth the process of change into soluble form 
is impossible. This explains the wonderful preser- 
vation of innumerable articles in Egyptian tombs 
for thousands of years, as honey, bread, seeds, 
cloth, wood, and other articles commonly perish- 
able. During the winter the fertilizer we have 
already placed in the earth is rapidly becoming 
soluble. The earth is not so cold nor so dry, 
ordinarily, as to check this process. In coldest 
winter it is warmer than the air above; and in 
fiercest drouth it is moister, — otherwise, plant life 
as we know it could not exist on the earth. 

Evidently soil-making is a constant process, 
though we are apt to think of it as going on only 
while we are applying fertilizers to the ground. 
The ignorant fruit-grower thinks of himself fertiliz- 
ing the ground only while he is spreading some sort 
of manure over it. Foolish man! The alchemy 
of Nature never ceases. He may scatter a few 
pounds of fertilizer in the spring but his orchard 
will feed, can feed, only on the food then available 
in the soil and near the roots of the trees. Very 
possibly this food has been a century becoming 
soluble and this fertilizer he is now scattering may 
not become available for many years. 

He may scatter a fertilizer, say nitrate of soda, 
which speedily becomes soluble ; or, say lime, which 



182 An American Fruit-Farm 

becomes soluble only in centuries. The hills 
which wall in the Lake Shore Valley along the 
south (and this Valley may be used as a basis for 
comparison with other favored fruit regions in 
America) are, as I have said, based on sedimentary 
rock filled with fossil shells of the Devonian and 
Carboniferous ages. The entire body of hills is 
raised land so that the layers of sedimentary rock, 
composed largely of these shells, are some seven 
hundred feet above the plane of the Valley. For 
untold millions of years the waters from the 
springs high among these hills have been seeping 
through these thick layers of shells, dissolving 
them and, flowing northward across the Valley, 
both along the surface of streams and through 
wide, subterranean rivers, have impregnated the 
whole Valley with lime. Where this ooze of water 
trickles over the rocks along the bluffs that face 
the lake, the impure lime is deposited in fantastic 
shapes. Only a few days ago, in company with two 
friends, I was revisiting the largest of the gulches 
that cut the hills from south to north and northwest. 
This is known as Gage's Gulf and, lying partly in 
New York, partly in Pennsylvania, runs some six- 
teen miles, in all its turnings and windings, from 
the crest of the hills, where it starts in a meadow 
by the roadside, to its mouth, and discharges into 
Lake Erie. All day we enjoyed its wonders of 
formation, and fossils — animal and vegetable. In 
the bed of the creek we picked up these vestiges, 
millions of years old, washed down by the fierce 



Feeding the Land 183 

currents of breaking spring; tossed down from the 
dizzy sides of the gulf by frost and trickling stream. 
Nature is still dissolving this immeasurable mass of 
dead oysters, clams, and snails, creatures of the 
dawn of time. Corals too in profusion, some like 
long lily stems, some like horns of plenty, all 
imbedded in the rock — hard, igneous rock, — the 
fires of chaos and old night having imprisoned them 
forever. No labor of sun or rain can now dissolve 
these corals, or free them from the embrace of flint 
and sard. But the inexhaustible heaps of shell are 
plant-food for ages to come, so long as the Valley 
can be the seat of life. Sixty millions of years, yes, 
for a hundred millions has Nature been dissolving 
these beautiful shells, each the sheath and skeleton 
of a mollusk of yesterday's yesterday. The pro- 
cess is no speedier to-day in your cherry orchard 
when you spread the lime. Scatter lime over your 
fields and centuries hence Nature will still be at 
work dissolving your lime and trying to make it 
available for plant-food. 

If we reflect but for a moment we can under- 
stand that any application of fertilizer we may 
give the land must be inert until heat and moisture 
and air, both above and below ground, have 
broken down the fertilizer, pulverized it, changed 
it into liquid and gas, and so made it fit for absorp- 
tion by the delicate cells of the plant root. 

Soil-making consists then in putting on raw 
material for plant-food, to be assimilated years, 
centuries, perhaps ages hence; or, it has been put 



1 84 An American Fruit-Farm 

on ages ago. There is nothing new in the process. 
Our trees, vines, orchards, and plants are growing 
because plant-food, deposited in former times, 
is now soluble and available. The plant feeds as 
it were at both ends — top and bottom, root and 
branch. We speak of the leaves as the plant's 
lungs; of the roots, as its stomach, — rather strong 
metaphors. The leaf is an arrangement of cells 
which both receive and give out gas. Some 
plants are "air-feeders," — not many however; the 
mistletoe, commonly called an air-plant, sending 
quasi-rootlets into the bark of the tree and so 
feeding on the sap. Yet we know that a common 
and trustworthy test of tree-health is foliage. An 
abundant, well colored foliage means a healthy tree. 
If we submerge the foliage in water or in a poison- 
ous gas, the leaves, and usually the tree, die. We 
have starved the tree by cutting off its supply of 
food by means of gas or water. In like manner we 
starve the tree were we to submerge the roots. 
Cut them off from soluble food and they, as well 
as, the tree, perish. Pack the roots in barnyard 
manure, or ashes, or nitrate of soda, or iron filings, 
or olive oil, or old clothes, and we starve the tree. 
Fill a man's stomach with mustard, or roast beef, 
or plum duff, or any like morsel of like solubility 
for infantile digestion, and we starve the body, 
though the process is somewhat accelerated "by 
other symptoms setting in." Many a tree and 
vine on the plantation dies of starvation through 
"auto-intoxication," which, translated, means 



Feeding the Land 185 

"self -poisoning." We do not commonly think of 
a whole peach orchard going off on a spree, say on 
brandy-peaches, but we may, and sometimes do, 
in our ignorance, intoxicate the trees to their death. 
The ignorant grower poisons or starves his own 
orchard. Thus, seeking figs and finding none, he 
condemns the tree as unprofitable, overlooking his 
own contributory negligence. He insists that it do 
double duty, — send forth new growth of wood and 
fruit abundantly on an empty stomach, or, at least, 
on short rations. 

But some one may ask: "If it takes centuries 
to get fertilizer into plant-food, what can the fruit- 
grower hope to accomplish? He cannot go back to 
the Devonian age, or to the time of the American 
Revolution, and fertilize his ground." True, he 
cannot go backward (though his orchard may), but 
he can go forward. He can make soil faster 
than does Nature in the wild ; he can apply fertilizer 
which will dissolve and become available as plant- 
food in far less time than the fossil shells which 
seep as lime-water through his land, from the 
hills. And herein lies the claim of all commercial 
fertilizers, that they dissolve rapidly in the soil ; this 
is their chief merit. All forms of decaying plants 
as fertilizers, — such as grass, clover, vetch, beans, 
weeds, straw, barnyard manure — which is largely 
straw impregnated with animal excrement, — re- 
quire considerable time to become soluble as plant- 
food. "Considerable" may here mean from one 
to five years, as the earth is warm and moist, or 



1 86 An American Fruit-Farm 

cool and dry. Heat and moisture break down 
the cells of such fertilizers, hence the necessity of 
burying them. Spread over the surface and left 
there, they decay more slowly than when plowed 
in, — as every farmer knows. He also knows that 
a heavy application of such fertilizer well plowed in 
produces more effect the second than the first 
year. Straw — the typical fertilizer of this sort — 
decays as humus and helps keep the earth moist 
and porous, and in chemical activity. But the 
tons of such fertilizer become soluble plant-food 
gradually and in a relatively long period of time. 
In proof of this one may cite the effect for years 
of applying barnyard manure to a field. This 
means that it becomes soluble plant-food slowly. 
The fertilizers help keep the soil making. Like 
the miller, you merely keep the hopper full, the 
grist grinds on and turns out flour. You keep the 
soil filled with matter which will dissolve and be- 
come available plant-food. This is all you can do. 
You yourself cannot effect the chemical change. 
All you can do is to supply raw material; Nature 
does the rest. The earth is only a porous crucible 
in which heat and moisture convert salts, acids, 
grass, straw, weeds, — whatsoever is soluble, — into 
plant-food. The plant itself is selective. "Each 
after its kind" is the rule. Grapevines, straw- 
berries, peaches, have each its appetite. The 
art of fruit-growing is to know this appetite and 
how to satisfy it. 

Practically, whatever the plant, tree, vine, shrub, 



Feeding the Land 187 

or root, the preparation of the soil for plant-growth 
is the same — to conserve plant-food in form of 
moisture. There is a difference between water 
and moisture. Most plants will live for a time 
seemingly on pure water, but in truth only so 
long as the supply or stock of food already in circu- 
lation in them lasts; for pure water is not a complete 
plant-food. Each plant needs a continuing supply 
of the elements of which it is composed. Thus, 
stating the case broadly, the chemistry of feeding 
the plant for fruit means a supply of soluble potash, 
but for leaf, stalk, or stem, a supply of soluble, or 
available, nitrogen. The air about us is composed 
chiefly of nitrogen, but so firmly fastened to the oxy- 
gen and hydrogen as to be unavailable to the plant. 
Doubtless the leaf, during its growing period, has 
power or, so to say, is functioned to disassociate the 
nitrogen from its companions. As yet we have 
no cheap, abundant, available nitrogen in form 
of fertilizer, available as plant-food. Here is the 
chemist's opportunity. Let us ask the men in the 
great chemical laboratories, equipped by private 
or by public means, at Berlin, at Washington, or at 
the university, to discover, if they can, a form or 
compound of nitrogen, abundant, cheap, easily 
handled and applied to the land, and speedily solu- 
ble in the soil as plant-food. This accomplished, 
wheat and corn and potatoes and beef and mutton 
and the long list of human foods will drop in price. 
Man will go up and food will come down. Here is 
the opportunity of the industrial chemist. He may 



188 An American Fruit-Farm 

not realize that farming is behind time. Food 
must be kept cheap enough for every human being 
to have enough. Not necessarily fewer autos and 
victrolas and moving pictures, but more nitrogen 
for farm use. 

Who said "hardpan"? Did you discover, 
before you bought your land, whether it rests on 
hardpan and how far it is to the hardpan? You 
may be buying a tight, shallow dish; a hardpan 
basin covered with a few feet of earth in which 
water collects and drowns the roots of orchard and 
vineyard. A grapevine or a tree spreads as much 
root below as foliage above ground. The vine 
will shoot forth innumerable roots down into the 
earth, some to the distance of twenty feet. If your 
soil is shallow and rests on hardpan, it will flood 
and drown at bottom and bake at top, unless you 
keep the pores and capillaries open and also get rid 
of the water. By piercing the hard layer which 
forms the "pan" you may possibly reach coarse 
gravel and so drain your land, or the dip of the 
1 ' pan' ' itself may give ample drainage. Commonly 
the strata beneath dip or incline and the super- 
fluous water runs down hill and away. If you 
expect to raise fruit, or indeed any field-crop, you 
must get rid of the water. Moisture in the earth 
is like oil that climbs up the lamp-wick and feeds 
the flame; moisture rises by capillary attraction 
in the earth and helps dissolve whatsoever it finds 
into available plant-food; it feeds the flame of life 
in the plant. If your land is hard, thin, poor, wet, 



Feeding the Land 189 

undrained, this capillary movement of moisture 
cannot go on. No tree or vine can thrive in such 
earth; you must first convert it into soil. The 
first step is drainage; the next step is drainage; the 
last step is drainage. Whatever the aspect of 
the fruit-farm, sooner or later we come to drainage. 
No drainage, no soil; no soil, no plant; no plant, 
no fruit. Perfect drainage means a responsive soil. 
Plowing, spading, cultivating, fertilizing, are in 
vain without drainage. Most lands have natural 
drainage, but too sharp incline of strata means 
wash and waste. Could a transverse section of the 
land be made, on your farm, to a great depth, say 
of three hundred feet, you would doubtless discover 
a succession of rock strata at bottom, then coarse 
gravels, clays more or less porous, then mixed 
gravel and fine clay as loam, and, at top, the soil 
as we commonly know it. The many gas wells 
which have been sunk in the Valley give us this 
knowledge. Land that can dispose of all ordinary 
rainfall without washing or flooding is well drained. 
Of two evils, a dry soil or a wet, the dry is prefer- 
able; for cultivation gives moisture, but standing 
water makes any land untillable. Land which, 
untilled, is hard, dry, and bare, may be made 
highly productive by cultivation, — stirring the 
earth makes it porous, sets capillary action free, 
converts the wild into a garden, By this break- 
ing up, gases and liquids in the earth go down 
and moisture and gases rise. In brief, circulation 
sets in. Earth must be aired, aerated, like bread, 



190 An American Fruit-Farm 

in order to become light, or like a feather-bed, to 
be kept wholesome. If you examine a well-tilled 
field on a sultry day, or amidst drouth, you will 
discover that the dusty surface covers a moist, 
porous, warm, productive soil. Scratch but with 
your finger and you reach moisture. This is an 
ideal setting for plants. The ground cannot be 
kept too porous, or circulation too complete. 
We avoid peril to the plant, or to seeds, by setting 
or sowing root or seed down moisture deep. The 
moisture-gage measures all plant-growth. 

It follows then that artificial watering is the bas- 
est abuse of the soil. It gives wind and sun a 
chance to bake the surface; it fills the earth-pore 
and drowns the plant's roots. The best watering- 
pot is a hoe, a cultivator that stirs the surface of 
the ground. No thoroughly tilled soil needs 
irrigation. Dry farming is best farming. Plants 
differ in habits, but every plant on the fruit-farm 
prospers by cultivation. Take the trouble to 
overturn a stone, a bit of wood, an old carpet, the 
board in front of the kitchen steps, even a bunch 
of hay or straw lying on the ground over night — 
the earth beneath is moist. Cover the soil with 
fertilizer and you catch and retain the moisture as 
it exudes from the land. You stop it on its way 
from earth to air. You make a like cover when 
you stir the surface with cultivator or hoe. The 
thoroughly tilled soil stops the moisture on its way 
to evaporation. So by stirring the ground fre- 
quently, hoeing the garden often, running the 



Feeding the Land 191 

cultivator through the corn, the orchard, the vine- 
yard, the berry patch, you conserve moisture for 
the plant-roots. This ordinarily, but the time 
may come when cultivation is but stirring the 
dust. Then water is in order, not a sprinkling, but 
the soaking of the soil, deep, copious, complete. 
Afterward, and as soon as you can work the land, 
stir it thoroughly with cultivator or hoe ; you will 
thus put a cover over it and prevent the thirsty 
sun and the greedy wind from draining it as dry 
as hay. This thorough cultivation is only a form 
of surface drainage. Somewhat curious to say, 
soil, to be most productive, must be drained top 
and bottom. The composition of the earth is not 
of great importance; loam, clay, gravel, stone, or 
sand, if doubly drained, and supplied with soluble 
plant-food, and located within the climate belt for 
fruit, — such land, various in context, is ideal and 
will produce fruit of finest quality and in great 
quantity. Such a soil is a chemical laboratory 
which turns out apples, cherries, grapes, peaches, 
prunes, pears, currants, and berries of every kind. 
Nature is economical and thrifty, ever providing 
for her own at long range. In any fruit valley the 
preparation for fruit-farming has been going on for 
millions of years. What an inconceivable tonnage 
of ripened foliage, leaf, stem, stalk, of fruit itself, 
has fallen to earth in this Valley and become plant- 
food ! What an immeasurable atmosphere has fed 
this upper world of plant life! And what incom- 
putable weight of mineral matter in the earth has 



192 An American Fruit-Farm 

disintegrated, dissolved, changed from solidity to 
fluid and gas and has fed this spread of root! 
Cycles of geologic time mean no more than leaf, 
bud, flower, and fruit to the plant, and ever that the 
same organ or part of the plant may be capable 
of perpetuating its kind — of repeating its life his- 
tory. Nature may not succeed, but ever essays 
immortality of flora and fauna. Doubtless in 
some later geologic age, seons hence, this planet 
will be clothed with a plant life as different from 
this we know as is this from the plant life of the 
Age of Fishes or of the Coal Measures. 

However, our business as fruit-growers is not 
with palm trees and gigantic ferns which turn 
into anthracite, or with trees of ages hence which 
may turn into dynamos. Our business is with 
the tree and vine of to-day; to respect its habits; 
to feed it well, and ourselves to feed on it. Nature 
teaches us how to mix our soil for what we call 
profit. But Nature and we have somewhat differ- 
ent purposes. She makes soil solely to perpetuate 
plants, each after its kind; we make soil solely to 
raise fruit — that is, what we call fruit, — not, as 
Nature would say, the seed that will reproduce the 
plant, but the fruit we use as food, which in our 
apple, peach, grape, cherry, prune, currant, or 
berry is not the true seed but the pulp that grows 
or forms about the seed, primarily as nourishment 
when the seed shall start to germinate. There- 
fore a fruit-farm is really a pulp-garden. The 
edible part of our fruits is the pulp. We throw 



Feeding the Land 193 

away the true seeds of apple, peach, grape, berry, 
— the pit, or stone. The plant-food we are seeking 
is really pulp-food. We prefer seedless apples, 
strawberries, currants, grapes; pitless cherries, 
peaches, prunes; and we measure our horticultural 
skill not by the size of the true fruit — the seed or 
pit or, to be accurate, the kernel within the husk 
or shell or skin, but by the quality, the color, the 
quantity of the pulp which envelops the true 
fruit. Nature, left alone, grows little pulp, but 
expends her energies on kernel, shell, or husk. We 
cultivate the pulp and try to make the kernel 
atrophy. So we fertilize and cross-fertilize, bud, 
graft, mix, and breed to secure the peach with the 
smallest freestone and the largest, most luscious 
and attractive pulp. 

Happily barren, dead land is rare. Poor land is 
comparatively rich. A fair test of land is the weeds 
it will grow. A soil covered with tall, thick, dank, 
glossy, blooming weeds means a rich soil. Change 
weeds and you raise tobacco, tomatoes, trees, 
potatoes, cabbages, vines. Barren land may be 
rich in minerals of the kind which, in soluble 
and limited form, feed plants. A bed of pure 
nitrate or phosphate would not support plant life 
any more than one of pure carbon, oxygen, or 
nitrogen, salt or iron would support animal life. 
Yet a sprinkling of nitrate of soda sets a plant 
bounding into leaf and stem, and a pinch of potash, 
soluble and fed to the tree or the vine, paints 
peaches crimson and grapes purple. The soil 



194 An American Fruit-Farm 

seemingly dead, yet rich in minerals, supports a 
luxuriant plant life by the addition of vegetable 
matter — that is, of decaying plant fiber or humus. 
This is the sign of the right sort of soil: abundant 
humus. It is the essential which no commercial 
fertilizer can supply. Dead trees make living 
trees possible. Dead plants are the bed of vege- 
tation. Lose the humus from your soil and the 
earth is no more productive than a pit filled with 
iron filings. Therefore, fruit-grower, in all your 
getting, get wisdom and understanding as the Book 
of Books advises, but be sure also to get humus. 
We know little of the secrets of plant life. We 
cannot see the grass grow or hear the doors of the 
flower open. Yet we know that soil devoid of 
humus is inert. The two components of the per- 
fect soil are vegetable and mineral; the vegetable 
includes the animal, but never the mineral, though 
mineral ingredients enter into every plant. Per- 
haps we are merely using words without meaning, 
but what we really try to say is that the elements 
known in nature in part compose the fruitful soil; 
that in one familiar form these elements are humus 
to us; in another form, they are mineral. Which- 
ever way the truth is expressed, we know that 
when we attempt to raise fruit our soil must 
be rich in humus, which to us, plain fruit-growers, 
seems to be the decaying vegetable matter in the 
earth. If abundant, this humus keeps the soil 
moist, porous, chemically active, and productive. 
If humus be lacking and the mineral ingredients 



Feeding the Land 195 

only abound, the land is hard, dry, lifeless. Com- 
bine humus and mineral, heat and moisture and 
cultivation, you will make the desert blossom like 
the rose. 

Now every tree, vine, shrub, and root is a con- 
sumer of mineral matter, sending its roots down- 
ward in search of food. Sideward also the roots 
run, and often surfaceward also. The heat and 
moisture in the soil break down humus and min- 
eral matter, making both soluble and thus con- 
verting both into plant-food. We have both 
humus and mineral matter in tree and vine, shrub, 
tuber, and root. Here again the law is working: 
"Each after its kind." Trees and vines pierce 
the soil to a great depth as compared with berries, 
tubers, and cereals. This means that the depths 
of the soil, not its surface, are the feeding ground 
for orchard and vineyard. Here is the cue to the 
fruit-grower's lines; the culture of orchard and 
vineyard differs from that of grain-field or truck 
garden. But how shall we get plant-food deep 
down in the earth? It is not found there as abun- 
dant as nearer the surface. Yet we know that 
earth that is brought up from deep wells and shafts 
will support plant life, and that germs, buried for 
ages, burst forth into plant life when thus exposed. 
We know that deeply buried seeds have great 
vitality, not because they have been, deeply buried, 
but because they are living germs, long carefully 
protected by nature against decay, and in condition 
to grow at opportunity. Doubtless all earth 



196 An American Fruit- Farm 

which constitutes the shell or husk of the planet, 
the shell between the molten mass within and the 
atmosphere without, will support plant life. But 
neither tree nor vine penetrates these depths. All 
our vegetation is superficial, keeping ever within 
the range of the sun's heat on the surface of the 
earth. Thus the active range of root-life is very 
limited, as is the range of foliage life. Indeed, 
foliage may be said to rise and roots to spread. 
Trees and all vines and shrubs grow literally on 
the surface of the earth. In Alaska the subsoil 
remains frozen and marks the impenetrable limit 
of root-spread. There roots grow laterally, not 
deep downwards. All this hints at the proper 
activity of the fruit-grower: to till the soil, not to 
burrow in the earth, or to bury plant-food too deep. 
Gravitation draws all supplies downwards; the sun 
and capillary attraction draw them upwards. 
Gravitation drains the soil below; the sun drains 
it above. It is a perpetual game of shuttlecock 
between these two forces which dominate all life on 
the globe. 

No man can utilize more food than he can assimi- 
late, and plants are like men. All that is given the 
plant more than it can absorb must lie dormant, or 
waste. We can send tons of good fertilizer on a 
profitless journey toward the centre of the earth, 
and not one ounce of food for man be gained. The 
fruit-grower must know what kind and what 
amount of food to supply his orchard or vineyard, 
just as the mother of the house must know how to 



Feeding the Land 197 

supply her household. While doubtless in nature 
nothing is actually wasted — that is, completely de- 
stroyed and eliminated from our universe, the ig- 
norant fruit-grower may put what he imagines is 
fertilizer on his land and realize no benefits. Each 
after its kind is the law. He may feed for tree- 
growth and starve for fruit-growth. In other 
words, his dietary may not be at all adapted to 
his fruit-farm. 

I have heard vineyardists declare that were they 
to be offered as a gift enough barnyard manure 
to cover their vineyards a foot thick, and it were 
delivered and spread, they would decline the offer. 
I have heard another say that he would not accept 
as a gift a foot depth of commercial fertilizer on his 
vineyard but would prefer even a light application 
of barnyard manure. A third has shown me his 
vineyard on which he said that for eleven years 
he had not put a spoonful of fertilizer of any kind, 
and that he declined six hundred dollars an acre 
for it. A few years later he died and the land was 
sold by the heirs for slightly more than half this 
rate, the apparent fall in price being caused not by 
any asserted deterioration of the land but because 
the heirs did not care to have a vineyard. But 
nevertheless this "spoonless" vineyard had not 
maintained its original record for production; it 
had fallen off in eleven years of starvation some 
fifty -three per cent. One of the vineyardists who 
so roundly rejected, or would reject, barnyard 
manure, lately informed me that his vines were 



198 An American Fruit-Farm 

light ; the growth of wood scanty ; the leaf color bad ; 
the fruit small and scraggly, and the production 
about one third of the amount during the first five 
years. There is never enough barnyard manure 
to go round, save as is the case with the owner of 
one estate, who being a high official of the Lake 
Shore Railroad sends to his fruit-farm carloads of 
manure from the Chicago stockyards and scatters 
it a "foot deep" among his vines. These show 
heavy growth of wood; rich, large, glossy leaves; 
and produce abundantly. Hence, after some 
experience, I abide by my judgment that, while 
fertilizer factories doubtless bring blessings in 
dividends to stockholders, we who try to raise 
grapes get and keep healthy vines and raise grapes 
abundantly as we cover our vineyards with barn- 
yard manure as nearly a foot deep as may be. 
Not being able to secure fertilizer in this form, we 
substitute cover-crops, as of clover, vetch, or turnip, 
which we plow in, and add phosphates, nitrates, 
and potash in such quantity as in our selfishness 
we may think necessary. 

That soil is a chemical laboratory in which 
Nature perfects the transformation of mineral and 
vegetable matter into available plant-food makes 
life possible on the globe. It is a vast and singular 
conclusion of the oldest science — astronomy, — 
that the life we know and see about us on this 
planet and of which we are part, is limited to this 
planet alone, — to this earth, this globe, this grain of 
sand in the universe. Most awesome the thought 



Feeding the Land 199 

that no other world, even if it has life, can have this 
our life of flower and shrub, of orchard and vine, 
of bird and beast and man. We are alone in the 
vasty deep of space, coming whence, going whither, 
living our span, thinking, doing, fitted for no other 
habitation in the commensurable world than this 
our home. And here the chemistry of the soil is the 
physical basis of life. We are not the chemist ; ours 
is not the laboratory. We may toss pigmy portions 
of the elements about, scratch the surface of the 
earth with a pin, drop seed in a hole, or plant a root 
in a crack. The chemical processes go on despite 
our petty activity or our valorous ignorance. If we 
plant the seed or set the root with Nature, she 
cares for it, feeding it bountifully; if we are indiffer- 
ent to her, she treats us and seed and root as mere 
elements to be agents or re-agents in her crucible 
and to become available food for the perpetuation 
of life on the globe, each after its kind. 

Helpless, bold, carrying our lives in our hands we 
must turn to the ground for our existence. It is the 
laboratory in which every work of man is latent. 
We discover that for our purposes and ends the 
soil should be as it were charged with plant-food. 
It is a case of intensive chemistry. For purposes 
of perpetuating plant life, each after its kind, the 
intensiveness is not required ; but for our purposes, 
to secure food in the form we desire, the soil must 
contain three elements in larger quantity than that 
in which they are usually found in the wild: pot- 
ash, phosphoric acid, and nitrogen. New land, 



200 An American Fruit-Farm 

as prairie or forest-clearing, river-bottom, or bed of 
ancient lake, usually is seemingly rich in all three. 
Ages of soil-chemistry — of disintegration of min- 
eral and of decay of vegetable matter — have 
stored up these foods. 

The land newly put to human use is a depositary 
of pent-up energy, which, set free on demand of 
seed or root dropped into the soil, is transformed 
into wheat, corn, oats, potatoes, roots, berries, 
orchards, and vineyards. Every farmer knows the 
superior crop- value of new land. He who has had 
experience in clearing off timber, planting the 
new land, the first year to potatoes, the second 
year setting it to Concord grapes, will record an 
extraordinary yield of potatoes, both as to quan- 
tity and quality of fruit, and also a phenomenal 
yield of grapes for several years. I have known a 
production of nearly eight tons of grapes per acre 
from such land for several years in succession. 
This heavy production was the cream of the land; 
the skim-milk followed when the foods, stored up 
for ages in that land, had been exhausted. Soil 
in the wild is soon depleted, — reduced to lowest 
terms of productivity by cropping. Cropping is 
wanton consumption of plant-food without 
resupply. Happily, on this new land, the 
grower grew clover to plow in, and applied 
phosphates and potash, thus warding of! the 
evil day of plant collapse. Cropping the land is 
like drawing all your money from the bank and 
winding up with an overdraft. If we will de- 



Feeding the Land 201 

posit heavily of fertilizers we need not worry- 
about cropping. 

We must keep the true balance in our soil- 
account by applying potash, phosphoric acid, and 
nitrogen. So long as the soil is kept rich in these 
elements, together with humus, — ever, ever 
humus, — it remains practically inexhaustible. 
When we clear land and burn timber, stump, and 
brush, and scatter the ashes over the soil, we return 
potash in the ashes, and ashes, as the farmer says, 
last a long time in the ground. But wood-ashes, 
unleached, from hard wood, are scarce. We can 
supply potash by using commercial fertilizers, — as 
muriate or sulphate of potash, a plant-food readily 
becoming soluble in the soil. The amount to be 
applied depends upon the need of the soil. A mod- 
erate quantity every year is better than a heavy 
application infrequently, — say once in three years. 
Three hundred pounds of the muriate (the sul- 
phate is stronger) to the acre is ample unless you 
wish to force the plant and, possibly, to waste 
your fertilizer. As it is insoluble in the air, it can 
be applied in winter; drawing to field on the sled 
and scattering about on the snow. It may well be 
remembered that the roots of tree or vine extend 
more than a mere foot from the trunk and that 
the entire area between rows may wisely be scat- 
tered over with the fertilizer. Moreover there is 
danger of burning the stock if strong commercial 
fertilizers are heaped around it. 

Phosphoric acid may be had commercially in 



202 An American Fruit-Farm 

the ground-bone fertilizers, or in pulverized or 
dissolved Florida or South Carolina rock. An 
annual application of four hundred pounds to the 
acre, or more as the soil may indicate its needs, is 
ample. I incline to the heavier application, even 
up to twice the amount named. Nitrogen, though 
the most abundant element in earth and air, is 
usually in an insoluble form. We get it from the 
earth indirectly, through the clovers, vetches, cow- 
peas, beans, turnips, and root-piercing crops gener- 
ally. These absorb the available nitrogen in 
nodules, as the clovers ; or store the element in the 
fruit, as in peas and beans, and thus make the food 
available. A piece of hard, barren land, if sown to 
one of the clovers and securing a good "catch," — 
that is, the seed growing, — with favorable weather, 
becomes a green field. Plow in the clover, and 
the land by so much becomes rich and tillable loam. 
Sometimes these plow-crops are not practicable, 
and resort must be had to commercial fertilizers for 
a time, in the form of animal refuse, blood, tankage, 
and nitrate of soda. But Nature herself comes 
to our relief. What spot does she leave barren on 
hill, or meadow, or beach of lake? The nakedness 
of yesterday is clothed to-day with grass and weeds 
and creeping vines. Nature not only abhors a 
vacuum but also barren earth. 

These foods — potash, nitrogen, phosphoric acid — 
slip quickly through the earth and may wholly miss 
the mark unless stayed in their flight, held up, as 
it were, by humus. This delays them till the 



Feeding the Land 203 

plant-cells can absorb them ; whence it follows that 
the more soluble the fertilizer, the greater care 
necessary in applying it at the proper time, and in 
quantity precisely measured by the absorptive 
and feeding powers of the plant. This means, feed 
the plant most when it is capable of consuming 
most. The nitrates feed stalk, stem, and leaf, 
therefore feed them when leaf, stem, and stalk are 
growing, when foliage cells are most rapidly form- 
ing. Potash is fruit-food, therefore have it at 
hand when the fruit is forming. Nitrate of soda 
would be wasted in late summer, in autumn, or in 
winter. Nitrates are spring foods, to be applied 
when the plant is growing rapidly, whether in 
spring or early summer. But fruit is forming while 
the plant is growing, so potash must be applied 
in time to feed the fruit ; it must be on hand, in the 
soil to that end. How long nitrates or potash will 
remain in the soil awaiting solution depends upon 
the moisture and temperature of the land. These 
being low, solution is slow; if very low, it proceeds 
not at all. But as potash is more insoluble than 
the commercial nitrates, it may be applied in 
winter, or late autumn. All commercial fertilizers 
are artificial and must be applied timely, evenly, 
discreetly. They are like stimulants to the human 
body, to be used with care. Dropped in lumps 
and masses on the ground, they waste in sun and 
wind, or remain inert, like rocks piled by the road- 
side. Brought into raw contact with the roots of 
the plant, they char, poison, burn, shock the root- 



204 



An American Fruit-Farm 



cells, and are no more helpful to the vine or the 
tree than hot coals or iron pigs. 

I prefer the processes of Nature, on the fruit- 
farm, to the laboratory at Cornell, or the factory 
in Buffalo, or Chicago. Cover-crops, such as the 
clovers, plowed in, supply nitrogen; ashes supply 
potash and some other ingredients, as lime. Phos- 
phoric acid is supplied by stable manure, by guano, 
by South Carolina or Florida rock, or by ground 
bone. x 

1 The average composition of the most important farm manures and 
of the commercial fertilizers is shown by the following tables: 











Potash 


Phosphoric 


Farm Manure 


Nitrogen 


Ammonia 


lent 


(K 2 0) 


Acid 
(P2O5) 


Cow manure (fresh) 


0-34 


0.4I 




0.40 


0.l6 


Horse " " 


0.58 


O.70 




o.53 


0.28 


Sheep 


0.83 


1. 00 




O.67 


O.23 


Hog " " 


0-45 


0.54 




0.60 


O.19 


Hen 


1.63 


I.98 


O.85 


1-54 




Mixed stable-manure 


0.50 


O.60 


O.63 


0.26 




Commercial Potash Fertilizers: Average Composition of Potash Salts: 


Name of Salts 


Average 


% of Pure Potash 


(A) Salts containing chlorides: 






Muriate of potash 




50 


Manure salt 




20 


Kainit (crude salt) 




12.4 


(B) Salts free of chlorides: 






Sulphate of potash 




50 


Sulphate of potash-magnesia 




27 



Feeding the Land 



205 



While the grower is feeding the soil, the crops 
are taking many tons of ingredients from it in the 
form of straw, — that is humus, growth of wood, 
twig, branch, and vine, leaf, stalk, and flower; 
potash, nitrogen, and phosphoric acid. The amount 
of material thus actually abstracted by the 

Commercial Phosphoric Acid Fertilizers: Composition of Fertilizer 
Materials Used as Sources of Phosphoric Acid : 





Nitrogen % 


Equivalent in 
Ammonia % 


Potash 

(K20) 

% 


Available 

phosphoric 

acid % 


So. Carolina acid phos- 










phate 
Florida acid phosphate 
Tennessee acid phosphate 
Bone black dissolved 








13 to 14^ 
13 to 16 

15 to 18 

16 to 19 


Bone meal 
Bone dissolved 


2^ tO 4^ 
2 tO 3 


3 to 5K 
2^ to 3K 




6 to 9 
13 to 15 


Peruvian guano 


6 to 10 


7% to 12 


\}4 to 4 


7 to 8 



The Nitrogen Fertilizers: Composition of Fertilizer Materials Used 
as Sources of Nitrogen : 









Potash 


Phosphoric 




Nitrogen % 


Equivalent in 
Ammonia % 


(K20) 
% 


Acid (P2O5) 
% 


Nitrate of soda 


15H to 

16^ 


19 to 19^ 






Sulphate of ammonia 


19% to 

20^ 


24 to 25 yi 






Dried blood 


ioyi to 

14^ 


\2y 2 to 18 




2 to 3 


Concentrated tankage 


\2% tO 13 


15 to 16 




I tO 2 


Tankage 


7^to9 


9 to II 




7 to 9 


Bone tankage 


5 to 6 


6to7K 




9*A to 15 


Dried-fish scrap 


9 to 10 


11 to 12 




5^to 7 


Cotton-seed meal 


(>yi to 7K 


7^to9 


I^t0 2 


2 to 3 


Castor pomace 


5 to 6 


6 to 7 


i to iyi 


\yi to 2 


Tobacco stems 


2>^ to 3 


3 to 3}^ 


2 to 10 


}4 to I 



206 An American Fruit-Farm 

crop from an acre of land varies, according to 
the crop, from one to five tons of straw, or its 
equivalent; from thirty to two hundred pounds of 
potash ; from four to seventy pounds of phosphoric 
acid, and from thirty to two hundred pounds of 
nitrogen. Of course the greater part of every 
crop is water, whether it be twenty tons of onions, 
four hundred bushels of cherries, two tons of grapes, 
or thirty bushels of beans. If, for example, thirty- 
six tons of cherries be harvested from five acres, 
this does not mean that in order to keep a right 
account with the land you must return an equal 
tonnage of fertilizer. We have rain 'and snow 
for nothing; but the skies do not drop potash, 
nitrogen, or phosphoric acid, or humus. These 
the fruit-grower must supply in addition to what- 
soever potash, nitrogen, and phosphoric acid may 
fall to the ground as leaf, — for dropping foliage 
contains some potash, nitrogen, and phosphoric 
acid, — as much of these ingredients as are needed. 
In practical fruit-farming, while undoubtedly 
the laws of chemical action work precisely as in the 
university, or the government laboratory, or at 
the experimental farm, yet not every acre of cher- 
ries is equivalent to every other acre in the country. 
Trees vary in size, productivity, number per acre, 
vigor, and so on in many details. But we know, 
as a fair deduction from our own experience, and 
from the record of the larger experience of others, 
that to avoid cropping the land we must feed it, 
not starve it; we must never take more from it 



Feeding the Land 



207 



than we give to it. In other words, we must keep 
it up to a working strength, with a surplus of 
resource ever on hand. I 

It is entirely practicable for the fruit-grower, 
by a comparison of commercial fertilizers, to deter- 
mine those most economical for his purposes. 
Because a fertilizer is cheap by the ton, as for 
example Kainit, it may not be so cheap as a more 
expensive kind which contains a larger proportion 
of an ingredient sought. Kainit is not so valuable 
as a potash food, as any farm manure. A ton of 
muriate of potash is as valuable, for potash, as four 
tons of Kainit. Common salt has many virtues on 
the fruit-farm, and is used by some vineyardists 
as a fertilizer. Experience does not support their 
claim of its value as a plant-food. Farm manure is 
worth more than any known commercial fertilizer 

1 The Amounts of Fertilizer Ingredients — Potash, Phosphoric Acid, 
Nitrogen — Contained in the Crop from One Acre of Land: 











Phos- 




Crop 


Yield 


Straw, etc 


Potash 


phoric 
Acid 


Nitrogen 


Apples . 


15 T. 




60 lbs. 


30 lbs. 


39 lbs. 


Grapes 


2 " 


7000 lbs. 


39 " 


11 " 


32 " 


Pears 


16 " 




26 " 


10 " 


32 " 


Plums 


8 " 




40 " 


4 " 


30 " 


Potatoes 


200 bus. 


1500 " 


74 " 


21 " 


46 " 


Tobacco 


1600 lbs. 


1400 " 


200 " 


16 " 


76 " 


Turnips 


700 bus. 


5T. 


180 " 


52 " 


80 " 


Wheat 


35 " 


3000 lbs. 


3i " 


24 " 


59 " 


Clover, crimson 




15 T. 


140 " 


40 " 


130 " 


Onions 


45,000 lbs. 




72 " 


37 " 


72 " 


Tomatoes 


10 T. 




54 " 


20 " 


32 " 


Corn 


70 bus. 


3T. 


55 " 


48 " 


83 " 


Beans 


30 T. 


2700 lbs. 


53 " 


30 " 


75 " 



208 An American Fruit-Farm 

for nitrogen or for phosphoric acid. By comparing 
the percentages of nitrogen, ammonia, potash, and 
phosphoric acid, of different fertilizers, together 
with a comparison of their prices by the ton, 
the fruit-grower may readily determine which 
kind is most economical for him to use. There is 
no need of rule of thumb here: the data are chemi- 
cally known and definitely worked out. Com- 
mercial fertilizers have a tendency to "burn" the 
land, unless it contains sufficient humus to min- 
gle with them in their solution. Burnt land has 
the hard, barren, dry look familiar to all fruit- 
growers. 

No man can successfully run a fruit-farm by 
mere book-knowledge. Experience, actual contact 
with the problems of horticulture, must be the 
basis of success; but the data of the business are 
better established and are more available to-day 
than ever before. The Department of Agriculture 
at Washington, and every Experimental Station, 
and most of the States now support such, issue 
valuable bulletins and reports, special studies 
and results of all sorts of investigations. These 
documents may be had usually for the asking. 
The works of Burbank are now being made avail- 
able and Professor Bailey's have long been classic. 1 

But the most impressive facts in fruit-farming 
are the hard facts of our own experience. One 

1 The reader is specially urged to utilize L. H. Bailey's The Principles 
of Fruit-Growing, as well as other volumes of The Rural Science Series, 
edited by him; published by The Macmillan Company, New York City. 



Feeding the Land 209 

primary fact is that land must be fed, if fruit is 
to be raised, — and fed generously. In the Lake 
Shore Valley, a natural fruit-belt, the land is badly 
fed. Cropping is the custom. Despite this abuse 
of the land, crops are heavy and profitable. Pro- 
per feeding of the land would greatly increase crops ; 
increase profits, and in no important degree in- 
crease labor. An acre of land that produces five 
hundred dollars gross or, as oftentimes, net, in the 
fruit Valley, is entitled to a full meal. If it feeds 
you, you should feed it. We farm in the soil, 
not in a book. Were the young fruit-grower to 
depend upon the book alone, he might think that 
he had only light farming to do ; that with a ferti- 
lizer factory, a contract with a commission-house, 
and an auto he would wind the machinery of his 
farm and simply stand by, in dress-suit and kid 
gloves, to take in the profits. He like all others 
must follow the farming experience of the ages. The 
world has been very slow to learn the art of fruit- 
farming. The grand rule in farming is to accumu- 
late humus in the soil, first, last, and all the time, 
and to keep circulation of the moisture and gases 
within the soil ever active. Plainly, the fruit- 
grower is a soil -maker. He cannot change climate ; 
he cannot change the habits of the plant ; he cannot 
change the chemical laboratory beneath his feet ; he 
cannot change the food of the plant and have any 
plant left to feed.' All he can do is to align himself 
strictly with Nature. The wind moves the ship, 
but whether to port or to wreck depends upon the 
14 



210 An American Fruit-Farm 

sailors. Nature produces plant and fruit, each 
after its kind, but whether wild or cultivated 
depends upon the fruit-grower working through 
the soil. Having selected in the climatic belt 
the site for your fruit-farm ; having selected your 
fruit -stock, the varieties you purpose raising ; hav- 
ing made your soil, learned its character, quali- 
ties, strength, and weakness; knowing what your 
plants need and how to supply the need, your 
fruit-farm is an organism functioned for action 
and service: a machine to be run. 

More than two thousand years ago, Cato, writ- 
ing on farm-management, asks: "What is the 
first principle of good agriculture? To plow well. 
What is the second? To plow again ; and the third 
is to manure. " Translated into the experience of 
our race, since man first ran a crooked stick over 
the surface of the ground and scratched the soil in 
cultivation, the old Roman's counsel is: "Feed your 
land and cultivate your soil." 



VII 

THE FRUIT-FARM AND THE YOUNG FOLKS 

IT is a common saying among parents: "We 
want the children to have something when we 
are gone; we began with nothing and know how 
hard life is"; and so they save for their children. 
But what of the children? 

The master built a ship for his children, but they 
did not like the sea, neither could they sail a ship, 
nor would they learn. A man built a fruit-farm 
for his children, but they did not like fruit-farms, 
could not run one, nor would they learn. There 
are children who like neither sea nor land. Yet 
there are many farmers and sailors, — but sailors 
on the sea and fruit-growers on the land. 

No parent, even the wisest, can account for the 
tastes of his child. The mother explains that 
perversity is inherited on the father's side; the 
father, on the mother's side; aunts, uncles, cousins, 
are cited. Nor can the wisest child explain the 
tastes of his parents, for it is a wise son that knows 
his own father. After all explanations have been 
made, there remains between parents and children 
a great gulf fixed, which cannot be bridged by the 



212 An American Fruit-Farm 

fruit-farm. What will become of it? What of 
the children? Of the parents? "Each after his 
kind." 

There is no fruit-farm poor or good but thinking 
makes it so. To be a fruit -farmer, one must think 
fruit-farming, for as a man thinks so is he. Few 
children think as their parents; few parents, as 
their children. In America there are many fruit- 
farms, but few fruit-farms occupied by the third 
generation. In these days when statistics and 
diagrams are devised to make knowledge plain and 
conclusive, the diagram of the vocation of a family 
in successive generations resembles a tornado 
record, the line of movement marking leaps and 
bounds, changes and variations and startling 
extremes. Even in Europe, that imaginary land 
of fixed, if not of steady habits, continuity of 
calling in successive generations of the family is 
rare. There is a famous Zurich family of mathe- 
maticians, and a famous Geneva family of botan- 
ists: son, grandson, and great-grandson, each 
eminent, who have been working, generation after 
generation, in the same field of science. Rare 
as are such families in the old world, and quite 
unknown in the new, they embody and represent 
the true use of leisure, — the activity of accumulated 
experience. I know few fruit-farms owned and 
conducted by descendants of the original settler. 
Shall I venture to compare generations of farmers 
in America with generations of great mathe- 
maticians or botanists in Europe? Fruit-farming 



The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 213 

is a branch of applied botany, as Luther Burbank 
has made plain. So too is it applied chemistry. 
The significance, if any may be drawn from com- 
parisons among vocations, is of continuity of 
activity in the same family. Certainly it would be 
easy to demonstrate in any valley that such con- 
tinuity makes for wealth, influence, public order, 
high character, and the general welfare. It would 
be highly interesting were some economist of 
practical tendencies to examine into the horti- 
cultural interests of our country and bring into 
common knowledge the effects of continuity of 
ownership of land, of mastery of its uses, and of 
contribution to the general welfare of the com- 
munity. 

In most valleys change is the law: new owners, 
the flotsam and jetsam of cultivation, the extremes 
of neglect, spasmodic care, hope, and disappoint- 
ment. Three removals are as bad as a fire, says 
Poor Richard. Usually it is the remover rather 
than the farm that suffers. The son cannot see 
the world through his father's eyes. To the young, 
the call of the world is as the voices of the Sirens. 
Youth likes or dislikes and chooses; age chooses 
on the margin of gain or loss, or safety. To 
the boy, it is ever something better beyond. Yet a 
trifle may deflect him from one career to another: 
missing a train; meeting a stranger; a chance 
acquaintance, a streak of sunshine, or a blinding 
snowstorm. Few are the men who are what 
they are because of deliberate preparation and 



214 An American Fruit-Farm 

choice. The younger Mill's life was prescribed for 
him, rigidly, by his father, yet the younger Mill 
is not measured as a wholly normal man. 

The tree drops its seeds and none can tell which 
shall grow and which shall not. It is the seed 
in the right environment that becomes the tree. 
For the visible forest innumerable seeds perished 
by the way. The planet on which we live is not 
large enough to grow to maturity all the seeds that 
fall to the ground. One pair of rats, unchecked, 
in a few years, it is said, would overrun the globe. 
Nature maintains the balance of life by a system 
of survivals, — which we are wont to call evolution. 
Nor is man exempt from the operation of the law. 
It is this law which is recognized, quite uncon- 
sciously, when the old folks say: " We want to 
leave something for the children." What is really 
meant is that the parents want their children to live, 
to survive, to perpetuate the stock. The domi- 
nant instinct of man, like the dominant force in 
the plant, is to perpetuate each after its kind. To 
be father of a line of kings was Macbeth's heart's 
desire. Napoleon yearned to found a dynasty; 
Sir Walter Scott enslaved his genius and worked 
himself into senility to establish a family. Alex- 
ander, Caesar, Napoleon left each a son, who each 
came to an untimely end and dissipated an im- 
perial dream. There is not now living a direct 
male descendant of any one of the world's most 
eminent men down to the time of Charles Darwin. 
Who to-day has the blood of Plato? Aristotle? 



The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 215 

Cervantes? Shakespeare? Newton? Washington? 
And the list may be extended through the ages. 

The trees of to-day are sprung from the trees of 
ages past — that is, the trees of the wild. When we 
turn to the trees of cultivation we find not one 
variety which comes to us unchanged from the time 
of the Caesars, or even of Shakespeare. Parton, 
in his life of Franklin, written in the middle of 
the nineteenth century, remarking on discoveries, 
inventions, and improvements which would most 
interest Franklin, mentions "the improved straw- 
berry." Shakespeare mentions strawberries; they 
were a common fruit in the days of Horace; 
Lucullus, before him, served them frozen at his 
feasts. Doubtless as a little boy Adam went 
strawberrying, but he did not pick Brandywines, 
Parkers, Earles, or Marshalls. Indeed, I suspect 
that the Garden of Eden, in his day, produced 
small, sweet, wild strawberries, like those that 
grow under the hedge and among the shading 
hollyhocks by the arbor. Possibly the original 
strawberry was only a small, hard, sour bunch of 
seeds. Forgotten Burbanks have added the lus- 
cious, juicy pulp and cast out the seeds. Yet 
despite all the cataclysms of the ages strawberries 
were and are. But the survivals we know are 
not of the Adam variety, but masses of scarlet 
pulp of our making. Man has made the straw- 
berry, the peach, the apple, the cherry, the prune, 
the grape, the pear, the plum, the berry which we 
know. Cross-fertilization and breeding assemble 



9l6 An Ann i II .in I i nil I .11 in 

dominant qualities and elements. This, too, i:; a 

;.ui viv.il. So Nature win:; wi 1; 1 1 < \ « 1 man does a 
wv w;nii oui children to live In comfoi 1 , not 

to :..iv in al'llnenee, and so wi' laboi foi Mkiii. 

vv<- make .1 h mi 1. 11 in i"i them, planl Ing orchardi 
.in. I vineyards. Possibly 0111 fiunily runs to sons 
in law, but we labor <>", hoping h>i the host, and 
hugging to our hearts the motto, ".1 rose by any 
othei name will smell as sweet." But whether 
we have sons or sons in law, they have their own 

ideal,;. It is the fi nil U as .1 commercial ai I icle 

that may inLerest them, n<»l as a living organism, 
01 as .1 home We would have oui children live 
in the security <>l the old homestead; they yearn 
i<» live anywhere else; or, possibly, the restless sen 
Son u| hie over, one of them son <»r son in law 
Lakes lh<- homestead as his portion and settles 
down to the solution ol that common | n < »l .bin, 
" What shall I d<> l<u a living?" If he can discover 

nothing preferable, he remains on the farm, is 

his estimate <>l its value his estimate ol assoein 
Lions or ol possible profits? I li:; esl imate oi itl 
value in. iv b<- ol emotions more justly to be 
accredited to the world-at-lurge. lie may look 
Upon the whole world us only .1 large fruil farm, 
and this his corner to be his refuge and his home. 
I rave you evei observed a lledgling leave the nesl ? 
II seems oblivious ol dangers. II flies ofl boldly 

.111,1 allghti i" boni ol the cat, or In a tub of wateri 
or is helplessly enmeshed amidst s stubborn brush 

heapi [fit alights In /OUI hands, il looks al you as 



The i'i nit Fai m and ih<- Voung Folks •'/ 

il \<»ii vviiv ,i I .rir, <»i ;i. stone, < >i ;i telephone pole, 

not casting even tlu; shy glance of fright i So when 
the young folks start out in life, like fledglings, they 
act {is il any place Ls a safe refuge and all the w«»i id 

.'in old I I K ih I. 

The prodigal son went to a far country: the fai 
I.Ik r from home, the kecnei Liu? isolation. Ureal* 

inj' home Lies means tin g youi l)a,cl< on old 

associations. II yon leave home very early say 
in infancy, yon are spared the break; it comes 
later, li at all. We who are parents and have 

formed associations and know/ that ;i l> lie ol 

the lakes a human life, would secure om estate 

I mm t heritage 01 not for our children. We know 
the value of these associations and would have the 
young folks know italso. Ihitas the fledgling can 
not I. now where tt shall alight when it soars from 
the edge of the nest, so the young folks cannot I- now 
l.h< ii Inline when they hrcil. the home ties. 

The first settlers in the American wild desired, 
as earnestly as do the owners to day, to leave th< ll 

children valuable Land as safest protection against 

the day ol want. Yet, turning ovei the pages ol 

the hooi, of the Pruit Valleys, we read ol ImmJ 

gration and emigration, east, west, and south, to 
pastures new, to callings and vocations more to the 
liking than fruit fanning. So too read the pages 
ol Lhc hoot: ol any community '" Amei [ca, We 
a. re a restless, a migratory people, who, in the shoi I. 
IpECe Of fi hundred years have overspread the con 
tinent, making settlements, organizing territories, 



2i 8 An American Fruit- Farm 

founding States. Upwards of thirty millions of 
people comprise this moving mass. Europe, Asia, 
Africa, have sent millions. Their descendants, 
called Americans, have swelled the stream, and 
every year it is further enlarged by more than 
a million who arrive from Europe alone. It fol- 
lows that results long ago foretold are occurring. 
The desirable lands have been taken up and no 
longer can a farm be had for the asking. Very 
rapidly, and notably since the Civil War, America 
approaches the condition of Europe: scarcity of 
land ; increase of population ; decrease of production 
of food-stuff; cost of living rising; the traditional 
ease of life in America vanishing. Never again can 
the old-fashioned simplicity of colonial life prevail. 
A hundred years in America have wrought changes 
comparable to those of centuries in Europe. The 
trend on both continents to-day is the same: 
toward class distinctions, discriminations, com- 
plexity of industrial conditions, elaboration of 
innumerable wants, and diminution of means 
and opportunities to satisfy them. In brief, the 
machinery of life seems ever becoming more 
complicated, and we are thinking, as it were by 
compulsion, more of the machinery and the 
machine, and less of the spirit who inhabits and 
moves them. This means the ever sharper reali- 
zation of the discomforts of life, real or imaginary, 
and the greater risk of experiencing discomfort 
than comfort. 

Parents now, perhaps as never before, are yearn- 



The Fruit- Farm and the Young Folks 219 

ing to leave something to their children that they 
may escape discomforts and pain, the enforced 
self-denials such as parents themselves have ex- 
perienced. We would have our children journey 
along the primrose rather than the thorny path of 
life. In this yearning there is nothing new; it 
is true of all peoples in all ages ; it is the touch of 
Nature that makes us all akin. But the antiquity 
of the touch does not diminish its humanity. It is 
renewed in every parent and yet to him and her 
seems as novel as a discovery. It may be ques- 
tioned whether, as land and all activities connected 
with it become more and more commercial, the 
chance of its successive use by generations of the 
same family does not diminish. The rural con- 
stantly approaches the social and economic urban 
state, though never seemingly actually reaching it. 
In New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, At- 
lanta, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, 
in any of the thousands of our cities and towns, 
the personnel of what is called "the business sec- 
tion" changes twice each generation. Sons and 
grandsons do not succeed to the business of their 
fathers, much less in it. The business of a great 
city as well as of a little town is done ever by new 
men. "Old established houses" are new. For 
many years in the Valley the sign over a well- 
known store read: "B. C. Town." A drummer 
who sold the firm sugar was wont to tell his other 
customers that he did business with the oldest 
town in the world. The date on the door may be 



220 An American Fruit-Farm 

old, but usually the business within has changed 
hands repeatedly. So too in the country : ' ' This is 
the same fruit-farm, but the A-y-l-s no longer 
own it; the children did not care for fruit-farming; 
the girls got married; the boys went to Chicago." 
In city or country the boys do not follow the 
vocations of the fathers ; farm-boys become bank- 
ers; bankers' sons become fruit-farmers. The suc- 
cession is as uncertain in the city as in the country. 
In affairs of state we call it a revolution, when the 
Bourbons cut off the young King of Rome from 
the throne of Napoleon, or the Prince Imperial, 
missing his seat in the saddle in Africa, is cut off 
by a savage spear, and the Republic goes on. 
There are like vicissitudes in private life; every 
station runs the risk of exile. The parents would 
prevent this but the young folks seemingly covet 
it. The farmer's son hates the farm; the banker's 
son hates the bank; the doctor's son hates the very 
odor of his father's office. The mere mention of 
orchard or vineyard brings up a picture in the farm- 
boy's mind of February fingers fumbling to trim 
interminable rows of interminable vines ; of ladders 
of weary weight and height; of endless bushels of 
apples swaying out of reach in a high wind, and 
never a dollar for the boy himself. The boy was 
thinking of how much pleasure that dollar would 
give him; his father was thinking of how many 
apples he was giving for a dollar, and quite forgot 
the boy. What if the father had invested the 
dollar in the boy by giving him a slight share in 



The Fruit- Farm and the Young Folks 221 

the apples ! Would the ladder seem so heavy or the 
apples so high, or the rungs so hard, or the wind 
so piercing? Or had the father invested a few 
bunches of grapes in the boy, would the rows seem 
so long or the vines so many, or February fingers so 
numb and cold? The father trims grapes all day 
long and never a word about cold fingers. The 
prospective profit in grapes keeps him warm. 
Hopelessness is always cold. Age nor sex is 
exempt. Here is the mystery of association. 

The father must needs make possible the right 
sort of associations. Every man pursues as best 
he can his own substantial happiness; the boy 
among the apple boughs sees his happiness in the 
apples, if they are his apples. Otherwise they may 
as well belong to the neighbors. It is a nice 
question on every fruit-farm, — as to the young 
folks, — whether the farm is really theirs or the 
neighbor's. If the boy picks apples for a neighbor 
he is really picking his own dollars from the apple 
tree ; on his father's farm he picks his father's apples 
for his father. At least this is the boy's version of 
the facts in fruit-farming. 

Shall the father then hire his own boy to pick 
his own apples? It is not hiring, when the boy is 
interested in picking apples. The family is the 
ideal community and the boy has his part in its 
communal work. But nowadays even the children 
''strike." Few seem willing to work for another, 
children for parents, or parents for children. Yet, 
in the Fruit Valley all the children have not 



222 An American Fruit-Farm 

"struck, " nor all the parents ceased to provide for 
their children. At least children under fifteen still 
stick to the old folks, but the youth of eighteen 
or twenty, working on the fruit-farm for "the old 
folks," is a rare bird in the landscape. Whether 
there be one or several boys, the fruit-grower 
usually runs his plantation by hired help. Not 
one of the boys is at home. The bank, the post- 
office, the grocery, the factory, the railroad, the 
office, not the fruit-farm, holds them. But the 
old folks still live on "the place," and the boys 
occasionally come home and look upon the farm 
as a distant asset. His business bringing him 
through the ancestral Valley, the boy "stops off" 
"over a train " and is a guest at the old home. He 
is treated as a visitor and discovers what a quiet, 
comfortable, pretty spot is the old farm. He sees 
it at a different angle from that when he picked 
apples from tossing boughs. He was not so well 
treated when he was a boy on the farm. Perhaps, 
had he been treated as well as the passing guest, 
he would not have left the farm. He did not know 
it was so comfortable. Bank, office, factory, seems 
for the moment a prison-house, especially if this 
visit be in summer. And he turns from the old 
home back to his prison-house with a sigh. If they 
had treated him as well twenty years ago, would he 
have left the fruit-farm in disgust? The glamor 
of office-life, clerical work, railroading, practicing 
medicine, — whatever his vocation, — has faded. 
Work is work whatever its name and wherever 



The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 223 

found, on farm or in factory. As now his eye roams 
up and down his native heath, to the hills, over the 
lake, across the grand sweep of orchards and vine- 
yards, comfortable homes among the trees, the 
quiet of prosperity, he is saying: "What more is 
there than this, but I did not know; I could not 
know; my father never let me know. Hard work, 
early and late; mud, and storm, and cold, and never 
a penny to call my own. That is my memory of 
the old farm. " Yet when this man was born, his 
mother said to his father: "Now, Samuel, we want 
him to have something when we are gone ; you and 
I began with nothing, and we know how hard life 
is" ; and so they saved for him, and in their zeal for 
saving they forgot him entirely and thought only of 
saving. They saved the money and lost the boy. 
"For the life is more than meat and the body 
than raiment. " Are the parents saving life or old 
clothes? Did the mother say at her boy's birth: 
1 You, son John, are born, delicious torment as you 
are, and you are born for the sole purpose of ac- 
cumulating $17,314.19; and you, Maria, — I forgot 
to tell you, that you are to marry $19,413.71, and 
mind you, both of you, not a penny less. So take 
notice. Now leave the room and let me sleep ; but, 
Samuel, don't forget to put on a kettle of hot water.' 
Was it not the thrifty mother of George II., 
"snuffy old drone from the German hive," who, 
as Thackeray tells us, was ever saying to him, 
1 ' George, be a king ! " ? And he played king till the 
curtain was rung down. What fruit-grower says 



224 An American Fruit- Farm 

to his boy: "You were not born with a silver spoon 
in your mouth but to get silver spoons." The 
orchards and vineyards teem with prosperity; 
many a fruit-farm grows a fine quality of grapes 
and a poor quality of boys. In laying out the 
farm, in making the soil, the farmer should plant 
boys as carefully as he plants grapes or peaches. 
Each after its kind. One of the contradictions in 
country life, real country life, not city-country life, 
is the splendid cherry trees, the strong horses, the 
multiple-laying hens, the tons of grapes, and the 
ordinary, not to say extraordinary, boys who turn 
out less than a ton to the acre, which itself turns 
out five. "The fathers have eaten sour grapes 
and the children's teeth are set on edge." "No 
grapes for me, thank you!" says the grape-grower's 
boy; "I'll take (accept!) a clerkship in a grocery." 
"What!" you exclaim, "and grapes at fifty dollars 
a ton and live at home, and the grocery business so 
overdone!" You think that you would take the 
purple vineyard and let somebody else keep store. 
But your father had a store — not a vineyard. 

The fruit-farm produced fruit, not boys; they 
were a mere bye-product; handy, if workers, but 
often much in the way. Expensive as they get 
older. Good as anybody's boys, but they will 
never make farmers. And so the years pass; the 
old folks become more economical, saving the 
more eagerly that the children may have some- 
thing to begin life with. When the children think 
themselves ready to begin life for themselves, or 



The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 225 

do begin it, ready or unready, — the old folks begin 
talking of saving for the grandchildren. Doubt- 
less Methuselah, in the last few years of his life, 
began saving for his grandchildren of the thirty- 
third generation. In every valley there are many 
like Methuselah, only younger and possibly more 
economical. It might seem there that posterity 
stands in a fair way of being prosperous, — as 
the world goes. These orchards and vineyards, 
sweeping from the lake to the hills, who shall 
inherit them? Yet, to-day, as for untold ages, 
and notably for a century and a half past, the only 
permanent resident of the Valley is the land. The 
people emigrate. A few ancient families remain 
on the old site their fathers chose, four generations 
ago, prosperous fruit-growers, than whom there 
are no better. It might seem that prosperity would 
prove contagious, but many who have eyes see not. 
For more than a hundred years young folks have 
been born in the Valley with peculiar eyes that see 
things far away but are blind to the world that 
spreads about their feet. Many a farmer who 
saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow could 
not see a living on his own farm. Even fruit-farm- 
ing requires the seeing eye. No man is larger 
than his vision. The dream of the old folks is 
that the young folks shall prosper, and the young 
folks have dreams of riches. They are daily bred 
to a creed of things. They will begin life where 
the old folks left off: riches are the principal 
thing, therefore get riches. But in the struggle 

IS 



226 An American Fruit-Farm 

for riches both old and young may miss the mark. 
The prize falls to another. Raiment and meat 
become more than life. The folks exist for the 
fruit-farm, not the farm for the folks. 

Various crops are raised in the Fruit Valley: 
grapes, apples, berries, peaches, prunes, cherries, 
plums of all colors, tomatoes, corn, melons, and 
people. Thousands of tons of grapes, cherries, 
berries; soil at eight hundred dollars an acre, and 
more; winters in Florida, California, Cairo; auto- 
mobiles; journeys to the center of the earth; build- 
ings shining with architecture and new paint; 
railroads, trolleys, cities, towns, villages, lawyers, 
doctors, newspapers, — the endless list of things 
called America. But the heaviest crop of all is 
expectation: "To-morrow! To-morrow!" Then 
shall orchards and vineyards and fields run more 
to the acre than "Yesterday!" or "To-day!" 
Indeed, To-day is only a rabbit-run to To-morrow. 
Gathering our crop To-morrow, we starve To-day; 
and Shakespeare could not be first to discover that 
"all our yesterdays have lighted man the way to 
dusty death." 

The fruit-farmer is saving for to-morrow, forget- 
ting to-day. The young folks live to-day. For- 
gotten by the old folks they live in their own world 
of fancy, immeasurably remote from the fruit- 
farm. They live where fancy breeds. Is it in 
vineyard or orchard? Or in the city? On the 
coast? In the office? The factory? Is it any- 
where save on the fruit-farm? Anywhere save in 



The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 227 

the Valley? "Yes," dreams the boy without 
interest in vine or tree, "it is anywhere but here!" 
Here is another chapter of the old, old story: 
breaking home ties; leaving the nest; seeking pas- 
tures new; going out into the world. Animals and 
plants have their native regions clearly defined by 
climate. The spice trees fruit only in the tropics; 
apples do not grow at the equator. We mark off 
the zones by the plants which grow within them 
and the wild beasts which inhabit them. Climate 
makes prisoners of all living things. Man alone 
seems the exception in that he carries his climate 
with him. To him it is food and clothing and so 
he penetrates the corners of the earth and makes 
most of it his habitation, and, save as moved by 
overpowering curiosity, or thirst for fame that 
comes from triumph over perils of heat at the 
equator, or of cold at the pole, he migrates always 
along the line of climate in which he was born and 
bred. This is the long story of the movements of 
nations and of individuals. The New West is the 
Old East removed a little nearer the setting sun. 
Even restless youth obeys the great law of mi- 
gration. He goes whither he can stand the climate ; 
it is his master and the racial instinct tells him this. 
He will not contend against perpetual frost or 
burning heat. He seeks ever to live under familiar 
skies. Who of us feels at home under strange 
constellations? Who of us knows what it is to be 
far from home and see strange stars breaking upon 
our vision? Restless as youth may be, it knows 



228 An American Fruit-Farm 

instinctively when it reaches a land in which it 
cannot live. 

It is instinctive in the animal world to migrate 
for posterity. Most birds are migratory, journey- 
ing far to nest and rear their young. All the birds 
in the Fruit Valley come thither every spring from 
the South, even the far South, Central America, 
Brazil, and the islands of the tropic sea, and having 
reared their young, return to the South in the au- 
tumn. It is one of the amazing sights of Nature, — 
the vast annual migration of the birds. It marks 
the power of instinct common to the animal world, 
— the instinct for the procreation and persistence 
of life. Birds have their nesting-time and they 
straightway seek their brooding grounds. Some 
birds are not controlled by this impulse ; they never 
leave the region of their nativity. 

I remember a farmer who not only lived for his 
boys but with them. When the nest-building time 
came for one of them, he joined in helping by 
building as a wedding-gift a pretty house, and giv- 
ing with it a handsome portion of the old farm. 
There the nest-builders live to this day — the third 
generation on the old farm. Had the father never 
read the signs aright, his boys — and he treated all 
alike — would have flown to pastures new, leaving 
the old folks forever. 

After the children are born, the parents dream 
dreams and see visions; there is more and more the 
backward look; and as the children grow into youth 
they too have visions, but their look is forward. 



The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 229 

To-day is overlooked; all is to-morrow. When 
nesting-time comes for the young folks they find 
themselves in an uncongenial world, and migration 
is escape. Acres of fruit, thousands of trees, but 
no room for the new nest on the fruit-farm. So 
the young people of the Fruit Valley fly to other 
valleys, and there build up associations for 
themselves. 

That supreme dictator of every fruit valley, 
climate, has never changed his methods or his 
might. Storm and sunshine, heat and cold, frost 
and snow, the gorgeous sunrises and yet more gor- 
geous sunsets, the sweep of air from the hills 
to the lake, from the lake to the hills, and up and 
down the Valley are to-day as they ever have been. 
All generations of men are prisoners of its climate. 

Then there are two that remain, soil and the 
man. Changeable or unchangeable? New men, 
new minds. Each generation is itself, unique, 
distinct, functioned unto its own day. The pioneer 
was not the child of our to-morrow, nor can he of 
the next generation be the pioneer. Each after 
its kind is the law. The man with the ax building 
the log-cabin cannot be the man with the check- 
book building the country house. 

What of the soil? It seems but yesterday that 
I cleared away the primeval woods; cutting down 
giant chestnuts and walnuts; trimming the logs, 
hauling them to the mill for lumber. All the rest 
burned — limbs, branches, underbrush, decaying 
and falling trees, and the great stumps which first 



230 An American Fruit-Farm 

were wrenched from the earth by explosives. The 
ashes I scattered, about and plowed the new land 
and subdued it by cultivation. What a wonderful 
crop that virgin year! Then the vines were set 
and the primeval forest of yesterday became the 
dark, dank, glossy vineyard bearing many tons of 
purple grapes. Twenty years have passed. Now 
it is half the tonnage. Have I robbed the soil? 
Tons of plant-food have I spread upon it ; carefully 
has it been tended, yet that virgin gift of the 
purple grapes can never be made again. Fifty 
years hence what shall the harvest be? Is the soil 
depleting? The cornfields of the pioneers became 
the vineyards of to-day. Those that remain no 
longer bear their first weight of purple fruit. The 
vineyards were torn away and orchards were 
planted in their stead. No longer do the trees 
bear their youthful weight of fruit, or withstand 
the onslaught of their enemies, fungi and insects; 
as the years pass, these enemies multiply. And 
the history of the Valley is doubtless like that 
of other valleys. 

You will hear it said in the Fruit Valley: "My 
grandfather could raise peaches without spraying 
the trees"; but the enemies of those pioneer trees 
are forgotten. We know that had the Valley then 
been filled with peaches, it was so far from the world 
they could not have reached it before they spoiled. 
Sufficient unto each generation are the enemies 
of its flocks and herds, its orchards and vineyards. 
Yet, despite the fall in production as time passes, 



The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 231 

the Valley to-day produces a greater tonnage 
of fruit, and finer fruit of its kind, than is produced 
on any equal area in Europe. 

Is the soil failing? Are diseases of fruit, insect, 
and fungous enemies increasing as the years pass? 
It appears not. We have cut away the original 
forest; we have changed the face of Nature; we 
have destroyed the plants, trees, shrubs, flowers, 
weeds on which these our enemies feed in the wild; 
hence they are driven to our orchards and vine- 
yards for a livelihood. There is nothing new under 
the sun even among insect pests and fungi ; we are 
reaping the harvest our civilization has sown. 
And as the land is more and more deforested, as 
the wild is more and more subjected to man, we 
may expect discovery of new insect pests and new 
fungi. The next generation must deal with these 
evils, for surely it will be confronted by them. 
More people, better markets, higher prices, — this is 
the outlook for the country at large. There remain 
the three dimensions of fruit-culture: climate, soil, 
and the man. Climate is unchangeable; the soil 
and the man remain. Man makes the soil. The 
keeping of all the valleys is in his hands, — the 
next generation and all that shall come hereafter. 
"Remember, friends, to-morrow is another day," 
runs the ancient Arabian proverb. That other 
day may mean in truth another Valley than this we 
see, for the man of to-morrow is not the man of 
to-day. 

We are come at last to the supreme interest of 



232 An American Fruit-Farm 

the next generation — the care of the soil. It must 
ever remain the test of all fruit-farming. Soil- 
cropping means the extinction of our race, and 
the steady depletion of the soil means the ultimate 
conclusion of the history of all fruit valleys. 
Enormously profitable fruit crops are now raised 
in many parts of America. The longer the land is 
tilled, too often the soil becomes thinner and poorer. 
The history of the production of wheat and corn 
is of this depletion. Not only has the production 
of corn and wheat removed to new land, westward, 
ever westward, but all along the line of removals 
production has fallen. From New York, Penn- 
sylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, 
Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, California, 
Manitoba, the great wheat valleys of Canada 
and British America, — whither next? The wheat 
strength of the older States exhausted; of the 
Middle West; of the old Northwest; of Minnesota 
and the Dakotas; of Canada; a long, long line of 
diminishing wheat-returns. And the day not far 
distant when America must import wheat. There 
are no more new lands in America. Will some 
variety of wheat be originated that will produce 
abundantly on lands hitherto unavailable for 
wheat, as the vast reaches of aridity, of mountain 
steeps in the West? All this means that farming 
in America has passed, like my virgin vineyard, into 
an older stage of less production and is becoming 
like the farming in old countries. It means that 
intensive farming must supplant extensive. If I 



The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 233 

raise eight tons of grapes again on these acres of 
vineyard, I must make the soil as I found it twenty 
years ago. There are no more virgin soils east of 
the Mississippi, and fewer each year west of it. 
We are confronted by a problem of problems: How 
to raise food of all kinds on a fixed acreage and for 
an ever-increasing population? 

Everywhere in America, the effect of this 
tremendous "pull" on the land by orchards 
and vineyards is plain. The best fruit-farms, by 
following intensive cultivation, hold to their old 
records and even surpass them, but hundreds of 
farms are rapidly losing their strength through 
under-feeding and over-cropping. Unquestion- 
ably the next generation, and generations to come, 
will receive a larger acreage of such worn lands, 
and it is their problem of problems to bring the 
soil back to, or forward to, or up to, its highest 
pitch of fertility. The old methods of fertili- 
zation, even of cultivation, even those practiced 
half a century ago are abandoned. Then many a 
valley was a vast stock farm, and barnyard manure 
could be had sufficient to keep the land fairly with 
humus. But we cannot longer build humus into 
the soil in this day. As the best fruit-growers 
interpret conditions, there was not, even fifty years 
ago, enough fertilizer used to keep the land in best 
order to feed plants. We feed the land better 
than did our predecessors. Consider one example. 
There are upwards of ten thousand tons of grapes 
raised each year in the Valley, and this enormous 



234 An American Fruit-Farm 

output on a little less than four and one-half million 
vines. In Chautauqua, the adjoining county, the 
yearly product is sixty-six thousand tons, on some 
sixteen million vines. Besides this yield of grapes 
the Valley gives orchard fruits, apples, peaches, 
pears, prunes, plums, cherries, quinces, and rasp- 
berries, strawberries, logan berries, nuts, and much 
garden truck. The federal census prints elaborate 
tables, long columns of figures, and leaves values 
quite to the imagination. Of interest to us is that 
the average yield of each grapevine in the Valley 
is a little less than seven pounds. Now the yield 
to the vine depends upon many conditions: the 
species or stock; the site; the trimming, and 
the cultivation; but essentially it depends upon the 
soil. The land that will grow the vine will grow 
grapes. A basket, weighing eight pounds, the 
usual size, to the vine, means six hundred baskets 
to the acre, that is a little over two tons. On 
virgin soil, or on soil kept in high fertility, eight 
tons are raised. This is a maximum and an 
unusual yield. There are hundreds of acres which 
do not average half a basket to the vine, that is, 
one ton to the acre. These are the neglected, the 
worn-out vineyards. All this means soil depletion. 
During the last fifteen years orchard fruits have 
come into fashion and fruit-growers have turned 
from viticulture to the raising of tree fruits — 
cherries, prunes, peaches. This means that the 
soil of an old vineyard may be virgin soil for a new 
orchard. But this virginity will pass unless the 



The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 235 

soil is well sustained for orchard fruits. If an acre 
of land will produce one hundred and fifty dollars 
in grapes, or five hundred dollars in cherries or 
peaches or other crops, it feeds a voracious crop 
and must itself be fed accordingly. 

Soil making, which is soil-feeding, is the prin- 
cipal problem which confronts the next gener- 
ation. It cannot be set aside. Just how to solve 
it, each generation presumes to know best. In our 
day the solution is largely left to the commercial 
fertilizer factories. This means an attempt at 
scientific farming. The Experimental Stations and 
Agricultural Schools, as well as the Institutes of 
Chemical Industrial Research, are working at the 
problem. The rule of thumb in horticulture is out- 
worn; yet intensive horticulture has made slight 
progress in America. Men cling to old methods 
because it is easier to cling than to think. No man 
has mastered the art and mystery of fruit-farming; 
he who knows them is of the next generation. 
Therefore it is undoubtedly true that the hardest 
problem which the next generation must solve, 
or help solve, or at least attempt to solve, is the 
problem of soil-depletion. Land is limited; popu- 
lation, unlimited. Subsistence depends upon the 
use of the land. It must feed an ever-increasing 
multitude. This means higher cost of living; 
higher prices for food ; a better market as the fruit- 
farmer would say. The number of bushels of cher- 
ries or of baskets of grapes may decrease but the 
number of people demanding fruit increases. The 



236 An American Fruit-Farm 

catalogue of prices for fruit is written not alone by 
the depletion of the soil but also by the increasing 
demand for fruit. Land is static; there are ever 
more mouths to fill. The market is open to the 
highest possible yield of fruit, and the yield per 
acre may by intensive cultivation be increased 
five hundred per cent., even more. The price falls, 
if ever, not by reason of tonnage on old lands but 
by temporary invasion of the products of new. 
This ceasing, as practically it has ceased in Amer- 
ica, prices become firm and tend to rise. The 
problem then is to raise the fruit. There is ample 
market for the largest possible production. The 
increase of population consumes all the increase 
in tonnage and demands more. And rich, well- 
tended soil means perfect fruit in abundance. 

America now is far less fruitful than were its 
every farm maintained at the level of highest 
possible production with present knowledge. Fruit- 
farming in America can as yet be said hardly to 
have made a beginning. Profitable as is this voca- 
tion, its possibilities are as yet quite undreamed of. 
All now done is but a hint of what might be done, of 
what shall be done by the next generation. Poster- 
ity will not neglect to move along the easiest lines. 
As the struggle for existence becomes more and 
more severe in America; as competition compels 
men to exploit the possible vocations, fruit-raising 
will become more and more a technical occupation. 
Necessity as well as opportunity will bring about 
a higher type and order of fruit-growing in this 



The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 237 

Valley as in other valleys. To this use the owner 
of to-day hands on his land to the next generation. 

And what shall this generation and its successors 
do with the Fruit-Farm? Of course they must use 
it and pass the use along to others. It is to the 
man we come at last. He is the soil as he is 
the thinker. The harvest is his thinking. These 
grapes, peaches, cherries, plums, prunes, berries 
— Romeo's raspberries — are his thoughts. The 
whole matter then is of thinking. Each gener- 
ation must think peaches if it would raise peaches. 
Ideas in the soil become plums on the tree ; no ideas 
— no plums. 

There are postulates, corollaries, and addenda 
to the vocation of fruit-farming which the next 
generation must duly consider. The grower is a 
Producer; there remain three other factors in the 
problem, — the Consumer, the Exchanger, the 
Laborer. This classification is somewhat rough 
and conventional, for we know that each factor has 
functions in common with the others. The next 
generation of fruit-growers must bear the burdens 
of government and misgovernment. Immigra- 
tion has passed the saturation point in America, 
and the excess is a factor of unknown powers. 
Certain it is that the individualism of the pioneers 
cannot distinguish the next generation. Co- 
operation, combination, convention, association, 
must henceforth be the supreme quality of deter- 
mining functions. Public opinion has ceased to 
be merely local; no one fruit valley can control 



238 An American Fruit-Farm 

the world at large. It must accept its share 
of service. It is to be expected that the mere 
external clothing of the Fruit Valley will change. 
On fruit-farms of forty years scarcely a vestige 
remains of varieties first planted. The con- 
spicuous survival is the Concord grape. If one 
turns to a nursery catalogue of forty years ago, he 
may read long lists of varieties now unknown, or 
known by another name. The Fruit Valley is a 
survival. So too is the fruit-farmer. Even the 
fences of the grandfathers have disappeared. On 
the site of the log-cabin stands the country man- 
sion. The springs have dried up and the house is 
supplied from public reservoirs, or from deep wells 
whose waters are lifted by wind-mills or engines. 
The age of ornamentation has begun and the next 
generation will beautify its estate yet more. Here 
and there is a plantation on which men, women, 
and children are taking time to live. Necessity 
breeds public and private health. But the next 
generation inherits our nature and we shall be 
present despite new kinds of peaches and cherries. 
Contentment is a rare bird in the land and it lays 
few eggs and few of its progeny survive. There is a 
philosophy in discontent, for that way progress lies. 
Quiescent satisfaction means petrifaction. Wis- 
dom does not die with the fathers nor will it be born 
exclusively with the next generation. The Fruit 
Valley is a stage and all its men and women are 
merely players. Our grandfathers could not know 
the ecstasy of an automobile, — its skidding, blow- 



The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 239 

outs, stalling, or "What in the world is the matter 
now"? — nor can the next generation ever feel the 
joy of going to church in an ox-sled. Yet the great 
things of life are not necessarily summed in rapid 
transit. And the next generation may miss some 
of these things ; it may not be able to see them on 
account of its Fruit Valley. Face to face with 
climate and soil and itself, the next generation, 
fighting for existence like all its forebears, will 
become in turn the theme of criticism in the mouth 
of its offspring; and as the day lengthens and the 
shadows gather, it will cling, like its fathers before, 
to the experiences of its own life, however bitter, 
and like all its race will at last find herself a stranger 
in a strange land. It too will have completed a 
cycle, for in every Valley the cycle of life is from 
the unknown to the unknown. 



VIII 



TEN THOUSAND A YEAR 



""THERE may be inhabitants of the Fruit Valley 
* who are "passing rich at twenty pounds a 
year"; the common demand is for more. Indeed 
many aspire to be catalogued among the half 
million Americans whose yearly income is at least 
ten thousand dollars. Comparisons grow in the 
Valley even more vigorously than fruit. Time was 
when money was a curiosity in the Valley — even no 
longer ago than when Captain Dobbins and his 
house-carpenters were building that immortal 
fleet which bore Perry to victory and made the 
Northwest American soil. It is no longer a curios- 
ity, but is looked upon as a sign or specimen of 
what the Valley might produce if it was thoroughly 
worked. So oftentimes the Valley is spoken of as a 
gold-mine. The millions that flow into the Valley 
to-day shrink in the eye of expectancy. To- 
morrow, — more. Like the grave, — more, more! 
Fifty years ago the farmer was passing rich at 
twelve dollars an acre from his land; to-day, his 
successor thinks one hundred dollars from an acre 

a small dividend. There are many rumors. One 

240 



Ten Thousand a Year 241 

hundred and fifty dollars from an acre of grapes; 
two hundred from currants; three hundred from 
raspberries; four hundred from prunes; five hun- 
dred from cherries; six hundred from peaches; 
seven hundred from — yes, that is what I was about 
to plant. John Law and the Mississippi Bubble 
could hardly stir the imagination to livelier fancies. 
And when we can raise grapes, currants, raspberries, 
gooseberries, prunes, cherries, and peaches on the 
same acre, — intensive Dalmatian cultivation, — 
why not "passing rich" on twenty-one hundred 
and fifty dollars an acre, and possibilities for 
lettuce, turnips, and cabbages between the rows! 
But shut the eye, and you are a millionaire! 

Were every owner of land in the Valley as 
thoughtful and wise as he is eager for ten thousand 
a year — and had he land enough — he might realize 
his hopes. Nor need he own many acres. But he 
must own ten-thousand-dollar land. Fifty-dollar 
land will not do it; nor five-hundred dollar land. 
Ten-thousand-dollar land and no other must be 
had. And there must be the man. Climate abides ; 
stubborn, friendly, hostile, freakish, helpful, domi- 
nant. So we pass climate. But the man is a ten- 
thousand-dollar man; not a thirty-dollar, or any 
dollar below ten thousand. Like breeds like and 
no man is greater than himself. And his fruit- 
farm is his measure. It is easier to see him in his 
farm than in his clothes, be it at mill or meeting. 
But his farm blurts out the truth about him. Live 
weeds keep no secrets. Dead ones tell tales. The 
16 



242 An American Fruit-Farm 

fruit-farm is evidence on the spot, and he cannot 
prove an alibi and also claim title to the fruit-farm. 
He may say what he pleases; his farm speaks for 
itself is his indisputable confession. We come to 
the man at last. 

And he makes the farm: soil, orchard, vineyard, 
and the rest. He selects the varieties ; trims, tends, 
harvests, markets. When he counts gain or loss he 
merely takes an invoice of himself. He may charge 
losses to the weather or to the wickedness of man, or 
to the hunger of fungus or insect; he may credit 
gain to the weather, or to the wishes of man and 
cultivation; but somehow, as the years pass, it is 
he himself who divides the account between loss 
and gain. If he is the gainer there is gain; if the 
loser, there is loss. Fruit-farming in all valleys 
is a human invention. Nature cares no more for 
filberts than for Canada thistles; man prefers 
the filberts and roots out the thistles in order to 
grow filberts. He invents filberts. He would 
invent Canada thistles on provocation. 

The man who produces ten thousand a year 
from fifty acres has a secret which he may not be 
able to impart. Usually it dies with him. His 
successor, on the same acreage, makes a bee line for 
bankruptcy. He understood how to do this, but 
not to raise ten thousand a year. Nor can he be 
told, or instructed; he is not the man for the job. 
There is no more familiar sight in the Valley than 
of a fruit-farm which was. ' ' While Jones was alive, 
you should have seen that farm; it isn't the same 



Ten Thousand a Year 243 

farm any more. Russell White knew how. That's 
all there is to it." This is speech of the Valley. 
The world knows a fruit-farmer when it sees one. 
They are not numerous. And the new owner of 
White's farm is a clever man, too, in his way. A 
"nice" man, an obliging man, even a pleasanter 
man, so the Valley says, than was old Jones ; but 
he cannot run a fruit-farm as White did. True, 
he can run it so that the sheriff wants it so badly 
as to take it. But that is not considered just the 
best kind of fruit-farming in the Valley. No it 
was White himself that made the White fruit- 
farm. When he died it ceased being a fruit-farm. 
It became mere trees and vines and took a gallop 
toward the wild. White transformed it from the 
wild into a garden. The pendulum always swings 
to one side or the other, or stops dead at the center. 
The Valley has many acres which thus swing from 
wild to garden; from garden to wild. Thus time 
passes by the horticultural clock. But White was 
a ten-thousand-dollar man. 

There was another man — Neville also born a 
fruit-grower. He inherited his acres and trans- 
formed them from mediocrity into capacity, — he 
really educated his land till had any Agricultural 
College in the country been fully awake to its 
opportunity it would have conferred on him the 
honorary degree of Master of Fruit-farming. In 
these days when colleges give degrees for stenog- 
raphy, bookkeeping, and economics, it seems strange 
that Neville missed recognition, for his genius 



244 An American Fruit-Farm 

made stenography, bookkeeping, and economics 
possible for scores of people — at salaries. But 
there is no accounting for tastes among colleges. I 
do not doubt that any faculty would have eaten 
Neville's peaches with relish and asked for more, 
like Oliver Twist, but as yet the capacity to make 
a thousand bushels of peaches grow where none 
grew before is not considered sufficient evidence to 
merit more from the Faculty than a modest order 
for peaches. Nevertheless Neville was another 
ten-thousand-dollar man. He could not have 
learned it from his father, or from the neighbors, 
and he never attended raspberry lectures. He 
was born an M. F. 

In talking with Neville I never quite secured his 
secret, — if he had one; yet he never concealed his 
methods, nor boasted of them. He knew wind and 
weather, and could anticipate the market closer 
than any other man in the Valley. He always had 
something to sell. Somehow his crops never failed. 
He would never suffer a poor plant to live on his 
farm. At almost the first symptom of disease he 
would root it out and replant healthy stock. He 
had few varieties and somehow managed to have 
the same kind together and always in paying 
quantity. His principal idea in raising fruit seems 
to have been to have fruit ripening all through the 
season. Beginning early in June with strawberries, 
he followed with berries, fruits, of tree and vine, 
till snow was falling. His reputation for fruit 
brought him buyers the year round, and he always 



Ten Thousand a Year 245 

sold to the highest bidder. His fruit was precisely 
as marked — never second quality with first, and 
no third. He used the most attractive packages in 
the market and some were made exclusively for his 
fruit. Gradually all the fruit in the Valley was 
good or poor, as it compared with his. His orders 
for fruit exceeded the production of his own farm 
but he would never fill in with that of another farm. 
All he sold came from his own. Some thought that 
he stood in his own light in thus refusing to act the 
middle-man, but he always declared that he raised 
fruit and did not handle any on commission. 

His fruit -farm, which was known as "The 
Neville Fruit-farm," was ideal in plan, location, and 
equipment. It comprised sixty-three acres, and he 
would never increase it though he might have 
bought a score of farms had he pleased. "I don't 
believe in walking too far for a cherry, " he would 
say; by which he meant that an acre of cherry 
trees, bearing to their limit, was preferable to a 
greater number either less productive, or to a 
greater acreage no more productive. He insisted 
that there is a practical limit to highly profitable 
fruit-farming; for example, that thirty-five acres 
of grapes are enough for one man to care for — 
that is, one owner. So not another acre would he 
have in vines, but he raised eight tons of grapes 
to the acre, which was equivalent, as the Valley 
averaged, to a vineyard of one hundred and fifty 
acres. He intensified the grape industry, and 
produced as much on one acre as his neighbors did 



246 An American Fruit-Farm 

on six. This is what he meant by refusing to buy 
more grape land. In walking over thirty-five acres 
he traveled no farther and labored not much more 
wearily than did the owners of six times his area. 
And he would not grow varieties; his one grape 
was the Concord. "I know the Concord and it 
knows me," he would say; and this mutual ac- 
quaintance, almost rising to friendship, yielded him 
over two hundred tons of Concords quite every 
year. "I have missed fire," he said one October 
day. It had been a cold, rainy year; insects and 
worms and fungus rampant and the market poor. 
"I don't run the weather. " But I noticed that his 
grapes were better than any others in the Valley 
and few of them of second quality. Other vine- 
yards stood out under the same sky, but he so 
managed his that they showed slight effect of the 
bad weather which had filled the Valley quite the 
season through. On asking him how he managed 
to escape the weather he replied: "I sail with the 
wind, not against it." This meant that the engulf- 
ing rains of the season damaged him not at all. His 
land was so thoroughly drained that surplus water 
could not remain long enough to harm the vines. 
When other orchards and vineyards were eaten 
by insects and stifled by fungi, Neville's, though 
infested, were but slightly injured, for he fought 
these pests every year, and, keeping his plantation 
quite immune, anticipated their ravages. "I al- 
ways do as if everything ought to be done," he 
would say, and would spray his vineyards when his 



Ten Thousand a Year 247 

neighbors considered spraying superfluous. But it 
was not the spraying that was his sole protection. 
"Feed the bugs too, " he would say, and enriching 
his soil, he fed the vines so bountifully they could 
be attacked by the pests and yet not seriously 
suffer. 

His orchards were like his vineyards — small in 
area but intensively productive. When his neigh- 
bors were picking two bushels from the cherry tree, 
he was picking five; so his cherry orchard of ten 
acres was equivalent to twenty-five of his neigh- 
bors, and his peach orchard of eight acres equaled 
their twenty. His prune orchard of eight acres 
surpassed any other of four times the acreage in the 
Valley. It was wholly a matter of intensive farm- 
ing. " If the land gives me six hundred dollars an 
acre, I guess I can afford to put a little back, " he 
said, and would expend seventy-five dollars an 
acre without hesitation in fertilizer. He had quite 
old-fashioned notions, however, about fertilizers 
and called the commercial ones "patent peaches." 
So the cars of barnyard manure which he managed 
to bring in from city stockyards — a very long 
train they would make in a year — were of what he 
called "the real thing," but I noticed that he 
mixed "the real thing " with many a ton of "patent 
peaches." Neville was always hauling fertilizers 
and covering the land, though he never allowed the 
cover to remain long above ground. "The wind is 
a thief and the sun is always stealing," was his 
comment ; so he plowed in his fertilizers as soon as 



248 An American Fruit-Farm 

possible. Winter seemed to be the favorite season 
with him for feeding the soil. Not a row of grape- 
vines or of trees was overlooked in the dis- 
tribution, and seemingly his ground never froze, 
for I have known him to plow when the snow lay 
several inches thick. But beneath the snow lay 
his last cover of fertilizer. 

It was Neville who introduced vetch and soy- 
beans into the Valley, and, possibly, cowhorn- 
turnips as a cover- or soil- crop. The vetch and 
the clovers often stood ten inches high at grape- 
picking time. He would smooth the growth down 
with a stone-boat and, sometimes, by paying a 
little higher wage than usual. "Blanket the 
ground and it will keep warm and be ready for 
you, " he would say when putting in his cover-crop. 
"Don't let the soil get cold feet, " was his prescrip- 
tion for a large crop of berries in June. I never 
quite agreed with him about sub-soiling — a soil- 
treatment he always practiced if possible, but as 
his orchards and vineyards became older and their 
roots possessed the ground he abandoned sub-soil- 
ing. If he had a fad it was for drainage. I think 
he was always ditching and tilling his land; his 
farm, as I remember it, was like a city street — 
always torn up. Most farmers would have been 
contented with the natural drainage, as those whose 
property sloped to the North, but Neville must 
improve on Nature and drain every pocket. 
" More money in drains than fertilizers, " he would 
say. And he drained deep, digging wells far 



Ten Thousand a Year 249 

down into the very coarse gravel; laying them up 
carefully with flat stone like an ordinary water- 
well, and covering them with large stones, or, in 
later years, with cement tops, below the plow- 
point. To this well he laid tile drains and so kept 
every foot of his land thoroughly ventilated and 
dry. "I'll see to the watering if it doesn't rain," 
he would say, which meant the constant stirring by 
the cultivator, and not a plant on his farm was 
ever known to wilt for lack of moisture. 

He was rather a heroic trimmer of tree, bush, or 
vine, but never was the excided limb thicker than 
one's finger. "Cut them when they are little and 
they don't feel it, " he said to me one day when I 
remarked on his ceaseless trimming. "All you 
want is sunshine and a penknife," he continued; 
and he let more light into the tree. "Any time 
when your knife is sharp," was his answer to my 
question as to when to trim. So he had no special 
time, like his neighbors, but all times. 

Just how he could detect varieties before they 
blossomed or fruited was a mystery to me; he 
was born with the master-fruit-grower's eye. No 
nurseryman could deceive him and none tried, — 
the second time. Yet, despite his unerring skill in 
distinguishing varieties, he never propagated them. 
"I'm not running a nursery, but a fruit-farm." 
There was more money for him in raising fruit 
than in raising vines or trees. 

So famed was his farm, nurserymen competed to 
sell him choicest fruit-stock, for his word was their 



250 An American Fruit-Farm 

prosperity. Rarely would he recommend any 
variety. "You can never tell what pranks a tree 
will cut up, " he said to a neighbor who asked him 
to recommend some variety of cherries. "I take 
the kind I like best." He always spoke of his 
orchards and vines as his friends. I think he 
communed with them in their own tongue, for he 
understood their secrets. They seemed to make 
their wants known to him and he treated them with 
as much consideration as a member of his house- 
hold. For this reason I think he would not enlarge 
his estate; he knew his own limitations, and was 
wise enough not to attempt too scattered a friend- 
ship. Hannibal is said to have known personally 
all the members of his army; Neville seemed 
to know each vine and tree as an individual 
friend. While he ran a fruit-farm, he also made a 
companion of each tree and vine on it. 

Herein lay his secret, his incommunicable secret. 
" If a man would have friends, " so runs a saying in 
the ancient Book, "he must show himself friendly." 
And again, "The tree of the field is man's life." 
Neville knew how to be friendly with peach tree 
and cherry, with prune and with grape-vine. I 
do not know how he maintained this relation, 
unless, as once he hinted to me, by association. 
Trees and vines were part of his life and so he 
understood them. Often have I seen him wander- 
ing alone among the rows of the vineyard, fingering 
the broad, swinging leaves; or under his peach trees, 
feeling limb and bark, as it were caressing the tree. 



Ten Thousand a Year 251 

And when the wind had twisted and lacerated one 
of his trees, I think he was as hurt as had some one 
wounded him. He would bind up the broken 
boughs and never weary of helping the tree recover. 
One of his fads was to have all his favorite trees 
and vines photographed, and on winter evenings he 
loved to sit by the open fire and look over the pic- 
tures, just as one likes to look over the faces of his 
friends. He would speak of "Sparta," "Athens," 
"Utica, " "Rome" with fluency; these were his 
names for favorite vines and trees. It seems that 
in his boyhood he had become deeply interested in 
ancient history and knowing no better names he 
dubbed his best horses, "Castor" and "Pollux," 
and one of his cows prospered under the name of 
"Proserpine." "Old Ajax is doing nobly this 
summer," he remarked to me, one July day, 
amidst the cherry harvest. He meant the middle 
tree in the third row, near the drive-way. How he 
remembered his long catalogue of Greek and 
Roman names I cannot surmise, unless precisely as 
the captain of the company comes to know his 
men by name — by association. But it sounded odd 
to hear Neville gravely instruct the pickers to 
"pick old Socrates clean," meaning a dumpy, but 
very prolific Italian prune tree at the corner of the 
orchard. I believe that he had a way of fighting the 
world's battles o'er again, with the aid of his vines 
and trees, for one afternoon, when I happened to 
be riding with him along the north side of his farm 
from whence it lays clearly spread out like a map, 



252 t An American Fruit-Farm 

he suddenly drew up "Castor" and "Pollux" and 
pointing with his whip-stock to this section and to 
that laid out the battle of Marathon, and said that 
the dumpy Italian prune tree was "old Socrates 
running away." 

I once ventured to ask him where were Welling- 
ton and Napoleon, but he had no trees so modern, 
nothing later than Julius Cssar. 

These peculiarities of Neville, which I may 
call his "classic shades," would have isolated him 
from the community had he really lived apart from 
it, but his look was forward, however backward his 
search for pet names to his trees. He never em- 
phasized himself — only his peaches and his grapes, 
his cherries and his prunes. As some fond parents 
thrust their children into the public eye on all 
occasions, Neville planted his trees and marketed 
his fruit. Had he not been a childless man perhaps 
he might have cared less for his vegetable friends. 
"They never quarrel," he said of his Concord 
grapes, one morning to me. 

It was the morning after that notorious day 
when the local council had "sold out" to the 
trolley company and had given them a lease, 
running ninety-nine years, to extend their double 
tracks through the village over the main road. 
Part of Neville's fruit -farm lay within the village. 
He had advocated a lease for not more than twenty- 
five years, with restrictions favoring the village; 
that the company should pave the street, keep it in 
order at all times; stop its cars at designated points; 



Ten Thousand a Year 253 

carry its feed-wire underground, and construct a 
siding with freight-station and convenient ap- 
proaches; but the council was found to belong to 
the company, for all purposes. "They never 
quarrel," was his solace as he again sauntered 
among his trees and vines, "And they never cheat. " 
"Ajax, " "Socrates," "Alexander," even the four- 
teen "Pharaohs," a prune tree for each dynasty, 
would not have voted the franchise. "But if 
Socrates should do such a thing!" — he paused at 
the brink of the awful thought — " I'd rip him out 
if he had a million bushels of cherries on his back." 
He was always talking in millions. " What is the 
outlook for grapes this season?" Byron, one of the 
buyers from New York, asked him the day he 
received Neville's first shipment of strawberries. 
"Oh, not a million tons, I guess," and there the 
estimate stopped. It was "not a million quarts" 
of raspberries; "little less than a million baskets of 
peaches." Neville always gave himself an ample 
margin in his estimates. "And Socrates and I are 
not responsible," was his word of relief over the 
trolley deal. The real Neville was his conscience 
and his Calvinistic conviction that "whatsoever a 
man sows that also shall he reap." This, you 
would say, had you known Neville, came to him 
by accident of birth, for his forebears were all 
Scotch Presbyterians who had settled in the Valley 
while Washington was President. Yet Neville 
did not pose as a religious man; indeed, some of his 
speeches, as is not uncommon among some denomi- 



254 An American Fruit-Farm 

nations, were rather flippant paraphrases and 
applications of Biblical speech, but in his heart of 
hearts Neville was a whole man, as one of his 
neighbors described him, — "a fruit-grower with a 
conscience and a bank-account. " 

It was Neville's keen sense of responsibility 
which made his fruit-farm the best in the Valley. 
"I put the responsibility on the other man," was 
his remark when his neighbors were complaining 
of dishonest labor, tricky commission houses, 
robbing railroads, and the crookedness of things in 
general. "If I raise first-class fruit, pack it right, 
label it true, and get it off my hands in sound condi- 
tion, I am not responsible for results." This was 
his philosophy. Again and again was he deceived. 
Sometimes he lost, but his philosophy survived. 
He learned what not to do. Somehow it was a loss 
to a man to cheat Neville. If the commission- 
house was the offender, it never again handled his 
fruit. If the hired help offended, he never hired 
the party again. If a picker put leaves or stones 
in the bottom of the basket, he was never suffered 
on the farm again. This rigidity of justice per- 
vaded all that Neville did. He was as faithful to 
his land as he would have the commission house, 
the railroad, the consumer to him. "You can't 
say I did not feed you," said he to "Socrates" one 
May morning when he could find not one bud on 
the tree. "You will have to do your duty next 
year. " And "Socrates" did his duty, — fifty-seven 
eight-pound baskets of cherries did the tree then 



Ten Thousand a Year 255 

yield. I think that had "Socrates" delayed too 
long, say three years, there would have been 
another in the place of "Socrates." 

I do not recall an aspect of the Neville farm 
which did not reflect this fundamental honesty. 
The roadway which passed midway through the 
farm was made as carefully and thoroughly as the 
king's road, and was kept in perfect order. Indeed, 
travelers through the Valley seemed to hunt out 
this private way for their machines, despite the 
warning sign of privacy Neville erected at the 
entrance to his estate. But a ride amidst vines and 
trees, in bloom or laden with fruit, and cultivation 
perfect, is a pleasure to the healthy mind, and 
the tide of automobiles flowed on, to and fro, 
through "Neville Farm." Posts, wires, stakes, 
clean rows of grapes, of trees, of berries; soil like 
an ash-heap; a carpet of chickweed in November 
beneath the vines; a carpet of clover, vetch beneath 
the trees; and save in mid-summer when the tools 
were running up and down the rows, the land 
always covered with green, because Neville's 
first maxim in fruit-culture was, "Keep the ground 
covered; a naked soil means an empty basket." 
He would point to the woods as his master: "See, 
Nature hides her nakedness with leaves." So he 
covered the earth with fertilizer and as quickly as 
possible grew a protecting cover-crop. "A warm 
soil is my coat, " said he to me when I once ven- 
tured to ask him, — it was a chilly April day, — 
whether he had not forgotten his overcoat. We 



256 An American Fruit-Farm 

were just stepping into the carriage, behind 
"Castor" and "Pollux," for a drive of some eight 
miles up the Valley to examine some draining he 
had heard about. I was doubtful as to going, for 
the sky looked full of showers. "A red sun has 
water in his eye," he remarked as he tucked the 
robe about him. Now the sun was not red, and, 
I may add, it did not prove a rainy day. 

Of all men I have known, Neville could read the 
weather best. He never lacked a bit of doggerel 
verse to fit the day. It was from him I first heard : 

Frost year, 
Fruit year, 

and, 

January blossoms fill no man's cellar. 

And after we were on the road, this April morning, 
he began quoting the famous weather lines from 
Richard III: 

The weary sun hath made a golden set, 
And by the bright track of his fiery car 
Gives token of a goodly day to-morrow. 

But Neville added, 

If the sun set in gray 

The next will be a rainy day. 

Once started on a delivery of weather proverbs, 
he would build up a whole weather bureau, drawers, 
legs, casters, and all. 



So 



Ten Thousand a Year 257 



Clear moon, 
Frost soon. 



When the stars begin to huddle, 
Soon the earth will be a puddle. 

Somewhere from Scotland must have come his, 

When the smoke goes west, 
Gude weather is past ; 
When the smoke goes east, 
Gude weather comes neist. 



And, 

Remember it well 
Your children to tell : 
The wind in the west 
Suits everyone best. 

This uncanny prescience of the coming weather 
brought Neville many a visitor. The Valley turned 
to him for counsel, whether to plant, to pick, or to 
trim, for sooner or later every fruit-grower wants 
to know what the day shall be. 

When Crawford, Neville's nearest neighbor, 
came to ask him of the day, Neville replied: " My 
boy, and you can see for yourself, have y' a pair of 
ordinary eyes, 

" The higher the clouds, 
The finer the weather, 

and you'll not be dripping with those clouds" — 



258 An American Fruit-Farm 

pointing to the blue — "these three days." So 
Crawford picked his sweet cherries. But a few 
days later, when I was worrying over the barometer 
and had appealed to Neville, all I could get out of 
him was, 

Mackerel scales and mares' tails 
Make lofty ships carry low sails. 

And I decided to wait till the approaching storm 
had passed. But I think that Neville, Calvinist 
as he was, placed most confidence — or to speak 
truly of him, placed supreme confidence — in the 
profound wisdom of the answer to the Pharisees 
and Sadducees recorded in St. Matthew: 

"He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye 
say, It will be fair weather ; for the sky is red. 

" And in the morning, It will be foul weather to-day: for 
the sky is red and lowring. " 

Neville liked to have scriptural authority even 
for his weather. So he read the seasons, the sun, 
the clouds, the colors of the sky, the stars, the 
wind, and even the very hollows of the air. It was 
an uncanny power — so it seemed to me — that 
enabled him to anticipate bad weather. I do not 
recall that he was ever caught napping in a storm. 
Everything about Neville Farm was ever prepared 
for the weather, be it good or bad. This wisdom of 
his contributed immensely to his prosperity as a 
fruit-grower. Just as he made friends with his 
vines and his trees, he made intimacies with sky 



Ten Thousand a Year 259 

and wind and cloud and the very colors of the 
landscape. The weather always warned him and 
he recognized the warning. So when his neigh- 
bors — Crawford, Moorhead, McCord, Mottier, 
Butt, Nash, Hampson, and so on for miles — might 
be holding off, as they said, for bad weather, 
Neville would be in full figure in his fields, pushing 
his work vigorously. But when he hugged the fire, 
most of his neighbors hugged theirs. I do not 
doubt that his weather-wisdom largely accounted 
for his bank-account. 

His rigid honesty of course cost him, as it costs 
anyone, what some of his neighbors were wont to 
call "a pretty penny." Whatever detail of his 
estate you looked at, the thing you saw was the 
real thing. His teams were of standard stock, 
powerful animals, each capable of pulling his full 
share. He kept "Castor" and "Pollux" for the 
road; his plow teams were never on the road, 
save to haul loads. "A mile on the road for a 
plow-horse," said he, "wears him out more than 
five miles in the grape-rows." He would not 
tolerate any misuse of his teams, though I have 
seen him use the whip thoroughly and to advantage 
on a stupid horse. But this was the last resort. 
He never coddled his horses, but cared for them as 
members of his household. I incline to think that 
he attributed a sort of soul to a horse, and he cer- 
tainly believed in a horse-heaven. But his curious 
fancy for personifying everything which has life 
may possibly explain this. He never sold a horse. 



260 An American Fruit-Farm 

When its working days were over he pensioned it — 
so to say. He gave it the freedom of a stretch of 
pasture land he had bought for the purpose, up 
among the hills, and cared for it in winter. Some- 
times he would drive up to this pasture with 
"Castor" and "Pollux"; draw up by the gate, and 
sit a long time watching the old horses in the field. 
He remembered all their names and seemed to 
have kept a strict ledger account of their deeds and 
misdeeds. One of his neighbors said Neville drove 
out to his horse lot to see whether any of his classic 
stock had flown away like Pegasus. 

All the farm-buildings were adapted to their uses. 
There was nothing superfluous. His fruit -house, a 
large central building, was convenience. Here the 
handling of baskets, the making of crates, the 
fastening of labels on covers, went on. Hither all 
the fruit was brought, sorted, packed, labeled, 
and from thence sent to the cars. All the lower 
floor was of cement. He had running water in the 
building; gas, both for heating and lighting, and 
several rooms which could be used, and were 
sometimes used, by extra help. The tool-house, the 
chicken-house, the barn, were complete and always 
in order. The place never seemed to get dirty, 
or out of order. The house in which the family 
that lived permanently on the farm dwelt, was 
spacious, attractive, and a model of convenience. 
Unlike most farmers, he believed that the family on 
the farm should have conveniences as in his own 
house. Now every fruit-farmer knows that the 



Ten Thousand a Year 261 

tenant is usually a very careless man in the house 
set apart for his use. Windows get broken; doors 
get off the hinges; queer things accumulate in 
corners; weeds grow about the house, and the 
whole place has a shiftless appearance. Just how 
Neville managed to prevent all this was his secret. 
"I put the responsibility on the other man, " would 
have been his explanation. He supplied an attrac- 
tive house and expected the man and his family to 
keep it so. He was always willing to make neces- 
sary repairs, to paper, paint, and to improve so far 
as was reasonable. His spirit was contagious and 
all who worked for him or with him caught it and 
carried it into their work. 

Yet he found many critics. Some complained 
of his brusquerie and independence, of his insist- 
ence on petty details, of his being unnecessarily 
particular, of his exacting the pound of flesh; of 
his secret relations with commission houses, rail- 
road presidents, politicians, farming-tool agents; 
of his prosperity. I think that at heart the trouble 
with Neville was that nobody else in the Valley 
knew just how to do as he did. Year after year, for 
upwards of half a century, he prospered. He never 
seemed anxious to get rich, yet he was truly the 
richest man in the Valley. He never volunteered 
advice, yet no man was asked for more. He never 
commented on his neighbors' omissions or commis- 
sions as fruit-growers, yet all the Valley kept an 
eye on his procedure. He never made a speech in 
public, never would accept office, and only towards 



262 An American Fruit-Farm 

the closing years of his life would he consent to 
become trustee of an estate, or executor of a will. 
Yet his hand was felt throughout the Valley. 
Many a barrel of flour, ton of coal, yard of cloth, 
and comforts miscellaneous which the poor en- 
joyed, could be traced to his hand. He stanchly 
supported school and church, but his idea of the 
press was summed in his devotion to the New York 
Tribune, in which he learned to read and which he 
subscribed to and read all his life. He believed 
that Lincoln was a saint and that Andrew Johnson 
was very much of a sinner. He voted for Horace 
Greeley for President and for a time wore a Greeley 
hat. He was never in New York, Boston, or 
Chicago, and only once could be persuaded to go to 
Chautauqua, and then to hear Bishop Simpson 
preach. He owned a pew in the First Church and 
was as regular as the minister in attending service. 
He never got quite accustomed to the responsive 
readings, or the paid quartette, nor did he believe 
— as once he confided to me — in free pews. In 
her way Mrs. Neville was an edition de luxe of 
Mr. Neville, but as she did not run the farm, hers 
is another story. 

As I have recorded, he had no children, which he 
took as a dispensation of Providence that he and 
Mrs. Neville were not suitable persons to be in- 
trusted with children, and he persistently and 
successfully resisted the efforts of the Lake Shore 
Society for the Care of Orphan Children to have 
him adopt specimens of the generations within 



Ten Thousand a Year 263 

their fold. And when the Society coolly requested 
him to leave it his estate, he replied, "And I'll 
not be doing when I'm dead what I'd not do while 
I was living," and the Secretary retired in despair, 
"for he had great possessions." 

But what — I hear you say — has all this to do 
with ten thousand a year? Many a man, probably 
no man, would be Alexander Neville. This one 
would object to his Calvinism; that one to his 
exasperating sense of responsibility; a third to his 
ignominious love of details. But few there are 
who would object to his income. Nor — as time 
proves — was this exceptional. There are others. 
The Valley has its Nevilles, like Shakespeare's 
plays. To-day his results are more than merely 
possible. Any fruit-farmer who has selected the site 
for his farm, has planted it to the right varieties, 
has cultivated it in season, and has marketed his 
fruit with due care, may report "ten thousand a 
year." It is not the big farms which always pay 
best. Some kinds of business, some vocations, 
seem to have their natural limits. I incline to 
think this of fruit-farming. Neville set the limit 
of thirty-five acres for vineyards; I accept the 
limit. But he really made his vineyards yield as 
much as six times their area under the usual culti- 
vation. So with his orchards. He intensified his 
trees to produce each after its kind. He was not 
fond of traveling many miles for a melon when he 
could grow one in the garden. One of his most 
cherished possessions was the grove, some three 



264 An American Fruit-Farm 

acres, of original trees, amidst which stood the 
farm-house. With land at upwards of a thousand 
dollars an acre he declined to clear away this grove. 
Instead, he cared for it and even replanted when 
trees died. He had a sense of the beautiful, and 
once remarked to me that if the Lake Shore 
Society for the Care of Orphan Children were to 
sell his farm, they would receive five thousand 
dollars extra for that grove. 

Neville was a philosopher. He was much given 
to quotation, and his favorite lines were from 
Emerson: 

For what are they all in their high conceit, 
When man in the bush with God may meet. 

I never heard him quote more of the poem; 
possibly he did not know more. His speech ran to 
epigrams, some of which I here set down for the 
benefit of all fruit-farmers : 

Feed your land and your land will feed you. 

Crop your land and you lose your crop. 

A hard soil means a lean purse. 

Humus in the land is money in the bank. 

Labor is capital ; use labor well and your capital grows. 

A weak plant is a perpetual loss. 

Standard varieties fill the basket. 

Let governments and State colleges experiment — unless 

you are a millionaire. 
Rule of thumb is the rule for losing. 
The best farmer makes the best book on farming. 
It is the pennies that count ; not the dollars in discarded 

tools. 



Ten Thousand a Year 265 

There are times not to do things. 

Trim the plant when it is at rest; its work is to bear fruit. 

Much trimming means quality of fruit. 

Better trim with a penknife than an ax. 

Don't wound tree or vine : no man can at the same time lie 

in hospital and do active service. 
The most profitable labor is profiting by labor. 
The eye makes the package and the package makes the 

market. 
Look out for the lean spots on the farm ; one lean spot eats 

up seven fertile ones. 
The land likes a mixed diet, but it must be fed. 
Handsome fruit brings handsome profits. 
Stones and culls in your package sell the other man's fruit. 
The quality of your fruit reflects your own. The quality 

shows the willingness of the land. 
Don't expect more from your fruit-farm than you put into it. 
The man who knows all about fruit-raising has not yet been 

born. 

His own house stood in another section of the 
farm. "Woods are getting scarce; pretty soon 
people will not know how they look. Better 
save this morsel as a sample." His whole farm 
hinted strongly of his sense of the beautiful. 
He set out hundreds of rods of ornamental 
hedge, and scores of ornamental trees and shrubs, 
and as many flowers as he could find room 
for. People sometimes wondered that he, of all 
men in the Valley the most practical in mere 
money matters, would fritter away his time on 
mere ornamentation of his estate. But he had his 
reward. Scores of fruit-growers in the Valley 
took the hint; the process of beautification begun 



266 An American Fruit-Farm 

by him has gone on and will continue with every 
generation that inhabits the Valley. 

He made me executor of his estate. The care 
was a great surprise to me. I think he was led to 
the confidence by my attitude towards his wise 
administration of affairs. I always tried to benefit 
by. it — a compliment which seemed to touch him. 
I was not surprised to find his affairs in perfect 
order. In the little room, off the kitchen, which 
he used as an office, I found the complete record of 
"Neville Farm. " On the wall hung the survey of 
his estate, showing its subdivisions — its various 
fields of vineyard, orchard, berry, and meadow. 
The farm-house, and the farm-buildings were 
carefully plotted; the mansion house in which he 
had lived so long ; the drives and alleys, the hedge- 
rows, the location of all drains and drainage wells, 
and in a series of books, running over some thirty 
years, I found an accurate account kept with each 
section of the estate — orchard or vineyard. The 
books also showed, from year to year, what treat- 
ment each section had received; when plowed, 
cultivated, when the vines or trees were trimmed or 
sprayed ; what material was used, and particularly, 
the succession of fertilizers each field had received 
— whether cover-crop, as clover, soybean, vetch, or 
turnips; or barnyard manure, or commercial 
fertilizer as potash, bone, or other kind. Each 
year was set out in a detailed balance sheet which 
showed expenses and receipts ; not a betterment was 
made, a tree or vine set out, a tool or an ounce of 



Ten Thousand a Year 267 

fertilizer purchased without due registration. So, 
too, every pound of product sold was accounted 
for, with prices, and particular circumstances, if 
thought worthy of notice. He carefully kept 
record of the commission men with whom he dealt, 
for his practice was never to retail fruit. All the 
houses he had dealt with for some thirty years 
were recorded, their financial standing clearly set 
forth. If he lost a consignment, the cause was 
duly set down and the name of the delinquent was 
struck from his books. A like detail ran into his 
personal accounts — but these I pass over as irrele- 
vant. I saw now how it was that Neville knew his 
land so well. Every new tree set out was of record 
not merely as to cost, time of setting, and perhaps 
comment as to wind and weather, but from time to 
time the tree was brought to book, and if unfruitful 
was torn out and its place given to another. The 
rule of the farm was "Nothing but the best." 
Every inch of land was in tillage, and every tree 
and vine was the best of its kind and doing its best. 
He worked on the theory that only the best is 
really profitable. Therefore he did not hesitate to 
tear out acres of vineyard or orchard, at earliest 
moment, if convinced of their inferiority. Thus he 
kept his estate at the top notch of fertility and 
production — an expensive but highly profitable 
management. Whatever season one visited his 
farm, it was seen to be in perfect order; quite as 
beautiful, to the trained eye, in winter as in 
summer. 



268 An American Fruit-Farm 

The Neville farm was of a trifle more than sixty- 
three acres, of which fully five were in grove, 
driveways, and alleys. For each year I found a 
balance sheet so that the story of expense and 
returns might easily be read. Thirty acres were in 
grapes, ten in cherries, seven in prunes, six in 
peaches, four in berries, and one in garden. At 
times he had tried currants, strawberries, goose- 
berries, quinces, and grape-cuttings, and evidently 
with profit; but, finally, he had brought his farm to 
the divisions and stock I mention. He believed in 
specialization, and I know that he purposed lessen- 
ing the variety of production. He had come to 
believe in grapes and cherries as dependable 
producers. His records showed that the grape 
crop had never' failed. Indeed, so far as I know, 
the Concord grape never fails to fruit. Not every 
year was the crop heavy — that is, remarkable, but 
the tonnage always returned a fair reward. Some 
years, from his thirty acres he gathered one hun- 
dred and forty tons, and one year, one hundred and 
eighty-seven tons, which sold, on the average, at 
thirty-six dollars a ton. His cherry record was, 
taking one year with another, of heavy crops 
alternate years. The ten acres in cherries were 
seven of sour and three of sweet — the sour chiefly 
Montmorenci — with some Richmonds and Morel- 
los; the sweet, Windsor and Napoleon, with some 
Black Tartarian. The sweet cherries bore less 
heavily and with less regularity than the sour. 
The records showed, in highly productive years, 



Ten Thousand a Year 269 

as high as five thousand bushels of cherries, of 
which about one-third were sweet, the aggregate 
return being nearly fourteen thousand dollars. Of 
this nearly four thousand dollars were from the 
sweet cherries. His prune orchard, the seven 
acres, in highly productive years, yielded twenty- 
three hundred dollars; the six acres of peaches 
— and he managed to maintain the orchard, it 
appears, some twenty years, for it was of this 
age at the time of which I am speaking — yielded, in 
favorable years, as high as thirty-one hundred 
dollars. But there were less productive years, 
when the gross return was as low as two-fifths 
that amount. His garden supplied a heavy sur- 
plus over the amount used by his family. The four 
acres of berries — at the time of which I speak, red 
raspberries were producing, en grosse, some seven- 
teen hundred dollars a year. But there were 
records of a similar acreage of currants, straw- 
berries, and, for a few years, of black raspberries, 
evidently tried and, in Neville's opinion, found 
wanting. But most farmers would have considered 
them highly profitable as Neville managed to 
make them yield — so far as I could interpret his 
figures — never less than two hundred dollars an 
acre. 

I went — out of curiosity — pretty carefully into 
his expense account for all the years of large and 
small income and discovered that on the average 
his yearly income from his sixty-three acres was 
nearly fourteen thousand dollars net. His expenses 



270 An American Fruit-Farm 

were heavy. His labor bill was very large because 
he was ever at work. His bill for fertilizers ex- 
ceeded fully threefold that of any of his neighbors. 
He was a little fastidious as to packages and con- 
tainers for his fruit, always putting it up for the 
market in attractive fashion; a procedure which 
meant much additional labor. Never a year 
passed without its permanent betterment of his 
estate, and chiefly in drainage, for it was a first 
article in his horticultural creed that "no land is 
better than its drainage. " His tools were of the 
best but not always of the latest pattern. He kept 
all buildings in perfect order ; was punctilious about 
roofs and foundations, unbroken window panes 
and fresh paint. Year by year he charged against 
his estate for interest on investment, taxes, insur- 
ance, and betterments. So, whatever the year, he 
could turn to its story of labor and returns. 

I was interested to discover that after deducting 
expenses, as the years slipped away, one year with 
another, Neville's net income equaled quite one- 
half of his gross receipts. I think that very suc- 
cessful fruit-growers will pronounce this return 
exceptional, as expenses more commonly equal more 
than fifty per cent, of gross returns, say from fifty- 
four to sixty-eight per cent. It is a matter on which 
scarcely two fruit-growers anywhere will agree. 
The personal equation enters here, and the expense 
account on the fruit -farm is as variable as the 
personal equation, and cannot be precisely antici- 
pated. Neville did things in a large way and indeed 



Ten Thousand a Year 271 

in a somewhat expensive way, on the theory that 
"only the best pays best." But there are many 
fruit-growers who think they cannot afford to do 
things in the best way. For example, Neville's 
expense for labor and for packages was higher than 
any other grower's in the Valley, because he was a 
very particular man; yet, on the other hand, he 
always received top prices. His labor bill was high 
because "he always kept the cultivator moving"; 
he was ever doing something of account on the 
farm. He estimated the value of his estate at 
sixty thousand dollars, which was moderate enough 
if one considers its annual production. Few invest- 
ments of sixty thousand dollars yield an annual 
income of fourteen thousand dollars, together with 
house rent, food supply, poultry, eggs, truck, fruit, 
and not last or least, 

"That peace of mind, greatest of all. " 

Whatever the income from the fruit-farm, we 
come at last to the man himself. If he selects the 
right site for his farm ; if he makes the right sort of 
soil; if he plants the right varieties of vine and tree 
and bush ; if he cultivates in the right manner, and 
gets his crop into marketable shape and to the right 
market, he may expect a fair income — quite 
possibly two hundred dollars an acre net. But the 
man must think and do; ever think and do. Ten 
thousand a year from a fruit-farm of fifty acres will 
not produce itself automatically. The man is the 
fruit-farm. 



IX 

BIRDS AND THE FRUIT-FARM 

ALL migratory birds are now under the protec- 
tion of the people of the United States by 
the Lane law, which after many years of agitation 
was at last passed by Congress. All who are 
interested in fruit-growing must choose between 
the destruction or the preservation of their or- 
chards and vineyards. For years the Government, 
State or Federal, has labored to teach fruit-growers 
all over the country how to fight destructive insects 
and fungi; the battle has raged fiercely. But we 
have come to the parting of the ways. Despite 
all efforts to combat the evil by cultivation, and 
specially by spraying, the alternative remains, 
"Fruit or no fruit? " Which shall we take? 

Recent years have brought more worms, insects, 
fungi, pests of all kinds into fruit sections of 
the country than were ever before known. For 
the first time many have begun to understand the 
story of the locusts of Egypt and the ten plagues. 
Never before have insect and fungous enemies of 
fruit done so much damage. In the Valley it was 

more than half a million dollars for one year. 

272 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 273 

Throughout the country it exceeded twenty-seven 
millions for fruit alone, and the total destruction, 
including that of hay, tobacco, cotton, truck, 
cereals, forests, was more than $800,000,000. 

We ourselves are to blame. Never before were 
birds so scarce as in 191 2. Never before were so 
many wantonly slaughtered. Fruit-growers killed 
them, and so cut off the hand that feeds; Italians 
killed them for the pot. All America seemed in a 
frenzy to slay the goose that lays the golden egg. 
Folly of follies! Spray and fertilize and cultivate 
all we please — no birds means no fruit, no crops, 
no foods. 

In southern France along the Riviera, one of 
Nature's most productive fruit-gardens, the de- 
struction of birds by man and by cruel storms, — the 
seasons of 19 10-19 12 were among the worst known 
in the history of the region — resulted in the almost 
total failure of all fruits. They who in America 
live in an equally favored fruit region may well 
take notice. We are swiftly making a Riviera out 
of our heritage. Scenery is all very fine, climate is 
health, but the sole hope of the fruit sections of 
our country lies in the production of fruit. This 
gone, poverty must certainly come to the region. 
What, for instance, except the fruit can pour 
yearly into the pockets of the people of the Valley 
the vast income they usually receive — more than 
two millions dollars? Will the growers, will 
the inhabitants of every fruit valley care for 
their orchards and their vineyards or suffer them 
is 



274 An American Fruit-Farm 

to be destroyed by their own carelessness and 
ignorance? 

Say what we please, our best friends are the 
birds. The immeasurable loss to the country by 
their wanton destruction could be avoided if we 
would only let them alone. Eight hundred millions 
a year! What are we going to do about it? Shall 
we go on spraying tree, bush, and vine and shooting 
birds? Shall we raise fruit only for worms — which 
is precisely what we are doing all over the United 
States. Consider the brutal facts of wanton 
destruction of the birds, illustrated in the Lake 
Shore Valley alone. In one part of that Valley 
called North East, which comprises the north- 
eastern corner of Erie County, Pennsylvania, 
there were about seven thousand acres of fruit in 
19 1 2, but this was so badly injured by insects that 
the result was as if there were only thirty-two 
hundred acres. This means that scores of fruit- 
growers paid taxes, worked, or tried to work 
thirty-eight hundred acres of fruit not merely for 
nothing, but as a breeding ground for worms to vex 
them another year. Nor is the Valley exceptional; 
a like folly reigns in other valleys. Consider this 
folly as a common procedure. In a region favored 
by Nature for the production of a great variety of 
finest fruit, men produce worms! Foolishly they 
do all they can to defeat Nature and to injure 
themselves. They kill their best friends and at the 
same time expend thousands of dollars to make 
artificial friends ; they imagine that spraying will 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 275 

take the place of insect-eating birds. Nonsense! 
Nature knows more than we. Consider the facts. 
The coddling moth costs America annually $12,000,- 
000 by destruction of fruit and $8,500,000 ad- 
ditional for spraying bill. Is that good business? 
One pair of potato bugs will breed 55,000,000 
potato bugs in one season. One pair of green leaf- 
lice will breed ten sextillion lice in one season. 
Try to write ten sextillion and see what sort of a 
figure you have! A pair of gypsy-moths busy all 
summer will produce upwards of five trillion worms 
to feed on orchard and. other trees. 

Nature provides a check on these and like pests — 
the birds. And who kills the birds? Do you who 
are a fruit-farmer? Do you allow the killing of 
them on your premises? What will a bird do for 
us if we let him and his mate alone? A pair of 
grosbeaks in course of the day visited the nest 
four hundred and fifty times and each time with 
two or more worms. Sparrows, chickadees, mar- 
tins, vireos, average a visit every minute to the 
nest, and two or more worms each visit. A night- 
hawk's crop contained sixty grasshoppers ; another's 
five hundred mosquitoes; a blackbird's thirty- 
eight black cutworms, the meanest worm for 
tomatoes, cabbages, strawberries, and the garden 
generally. And in 19 12 there were more cut- 
worms and fewer blackbirds in the Valley than ever 
before in its history. One song-sparrow devours 
more than fifteen hundred worms in one day, and 
this cheeriest of songsters, who abides with us the 



276 An American Fruit-Farm 

longest of all songsters, always lives in or near a 
vineyard. A scarlet tanager has been seen to 
devour at the rate of thirty-five gypsy-moths a 
minute for eighteen minutes at a time. More than 
fifty species of birds, nearly all of which would 
frequent the Valley — and most other valleys also — 
if we would let them, live on caterpillars and plant- 
lice. A pair of robins will eat, on the average, all 
summer long, two worms every minute and rear 
several broods to do the same act. And do you 
kill robins? You say the robin eats cherries. But 
the worms destroy infinitely more. You pay out 
money to spray your trees; the robins will do the 
work for nothing. And the woodpeckers, one and 
all, are worth their weight in gold. They do more 
to protect a fruit-tree than any other bird. You 
may see them, if you do not kill them, search- 
ing over the tree bark, stem, leaf, bud, even the 
blossoms and the fruit, devouring, not cherries, 
peaches, plums, prunes, but bugs, lice, myriads of 
lice. Of course we ought to shoot them and spray 
the tree and ask Uncle Sam to maintain an experi- 
ment station in our locality for our benefit! Is 
not this the climax of folly? What if the fruit- 
grower were to let the birds alone, make his estate 
a bird preserve, and put up a sign, "Pothunters, 
Take Warning!" 

A curious calculation as to the use of birds — and 
one which must make a deep impression, if it be 
considered at all — has been made by Kalbfus: 
Each young bird in the nest daily consumes an 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 277 

amount of animal food equal to its weight. Sup- 
pose that there is one nest of birds to every acre of 
land in Pennsylvania, 28,800 acres; this means 
3600 tons of insects consumed every day; of course 
"insects" include insect life in its three forms — 
worm, pupa, and winged, — not to speak of insects 
in the egg. On the average, is there one bird's nest 
to every acre of land in that commonwealth? 
Undoubtedly there are more. Robins live fifteen 
years. Few birds live out their time, being cut off 
by storms, famine, or enemies, of whom the chief 
is man. Few die of disease. Three thousand six 
hundred tons of insects consumed daily make how 
many for one summer? Figure this out and j^ou 
will discover that for four months alone it makes 
insects enough to load a freight train nine miles 
long, each car holding sixty tons! And this for 
Pennsylvania only. What if we include all the 
forty-eight States? It means that during one 
season of only four months the birds of America 
— assign but one pair of birds to every acre — con- 
sume more than 3,600,000 tons of insects, or 
enough to load a freight train nine hundred miles 
long, each car carrying sixty tons; that is, a train 
reaching from Buffalo to Chicago, full of the most 
loathsome, the most injurious, the most pestilential 
creatures known to man. Of course kill the birds ! 
Of course it is better to have 3,600,000 tons of bugs 
and worms devour our crops than to have these 
same insects ground up in the crops of birds ! 
A bird has a higher blood-temperature than any 



278 An American Fruit-Farm 

other animal. Its circulation is more rapid. It is 
more active also. To keep up this higher tempera- 
ture, this more rapid circulation, this greater 
activity, it must eat more in proportion than any 
other animal. Birds are the biggest eaters in the 
world — not even excepting people who patronize 
picnics. This explains the daily consumption of 
a nine-mile trainload of insects in Pennsylvania 
alone. We have added in a like tonnage for the 
other States of the Union; add in the tonnage for 
Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, 
the Isles of the Sea! Who can compute the ton- 
nage? Now we can dimly understand the state- 
ment made by men who speak by the strength of 
accurate knowledge that, if insects are not curbed 
in some way, this planet will become uninhabitable 
for man in less than twenty years. I believe that 
the facts warrant cutting this length of time in 
half. So of course, kill birds! Pass laws to kill 
them! Encourage pothunters to kill them! Cats, 
ever more cats to kill them! Kill the (cats?) birds, 
and, like Herod of old, be devoured by worms ! 

Birds are essential to human life. No birds, no 
people. Charles Darwin proved once and for all 
that there would be no soil were there no earth- 
worms. Robins appear to have read Darwin's 
famous book on Earthworms. They also seem to 
know about cutworms and some other like friends 
of man found in gardens. Of course black cut- 
worms and grubs are more to be desired than 
robins. Some people have the perversity to believe 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 279 

that too many cutworms spoil the tomato patch. 
A robin treats her family to pounds and pounds 
of cutworms, each summer, but she also eats a 
cherry! Off goes her head! How about the man 
who raises wormy cherries? He demands just as 
much per bushel — worms and all — as if the fruit 
was first-class. The innocent purchaser thinks 
that it might be a good thing to let loose a few 
robins in that man's cherry orchard. Does he 
think so? Not he. He, as is said, is saving at the 
spigot and leaking at the bung. No, he is not a 
stingy man — he gives a nickel for the mission in 
China. No, he is not an ignorant man — he went 
to school; he can read, write, and cipher. But he 
yearns to preserve that nine-hundred-mile freight 
train full of bugs; he believes in the laissez faire, 
the free-trade theory of worms; the let-alone 
theory, save as to birds; kill birds, raise bugs. 
If only these fruit-growers and farmers who do all 
they can to kill birds might have all the bugs on 
their farms and in their vineyards and orchards, — 
and keep them there! But no; these are the very 
men who complain first and loudest and demand 
State and Congressional appropriations for experi- 
ment stations and the assignment of experts from 
the Department of Agriculture at Washington to 
kill insects and fungi for them — while they kill 
birds. The United States now protects all migra- 
tory and all insectivorous birds — or at least, the 
law of 191 3 was enacted for this purpose. Several 
States have protective laws ; but as yet the hand of 



280 An American Fruit- Farm 

man is hardly stayed in this country from the 
wanton destruction of birds. The mind of our 
people is not yet right on bird-protection, nor will 
it be right until they are the law, and not one bird 
helpful to man by destroying insects can be killed 
wantonly on American soil. 1 

Every State has some sort of game law, the best 
at present, fixing penalties for killing birds "out 
of season," or with "automatic guns," "traps" of 
certain kinds, and providing for special officers to 
see that the law is executed. But to-day there is an 
army of more than 5,000,000 men who at some 
time during each year scour forest, field, mountain- 
side, thicket, and glen and kill every feathered 
creature in sight. There must be a bird-conscience 
in Americans before they will adequately protect 
the birds. 

It appears by the census that the destruction of 
farm products by insects in 19 12 was more than 
$973,000,000. Only a few hundred millions! 
What are they to a great, a powerful, an intelligent, 
a progressive country like ours ! Not every 
country can feed its bugs and worms a thousand 
millions a year and build a Panama Canal, and 
four warships, and no end of post-offices, and 
knock off the tariff on foodstuffs, and do sundry 
other minor things in one year — and survive! 



1 There are innumerable books about birds. The best single volume, 
as yet, is Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation, 
by William T. Hornaday, Sc.D. With maps and illustrations. New 
York; New York Zoological Society, 19 13, 411 pp. 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 281 

In the State of Pennsylvania, alone during that 
year, the loss by ravage of insects was greater than 
the entire income of the Lake Shore Valley, a 
hundred times over. 

Birds preserve the balance between all food 
products and insect and fungous enemies. De- 
stroy birds and this balance is destroyed; nor can 
spraying restore the balance; nor can cultivation. 
Let Nature have her way. She is our best friend. 
Vain men think they know better what to do than 
Nature. The whole secret of fruit-growing is to 
be on the side of Nature. Bird-destruction means 
wasted work, wasted crops, the perilous increase of 
insect and fungous pests. What makes a farmer 
more wrathful than to discover a trespasser ruin- 
ing his crops; stealing his fruit, snaring his fowls, 
catching his fish? But when a dozen turtle-doves 
settle down in the wheat-stubble, the farmer gets 
his gun, or suffers another to get a gun, and hurries 
out to kill. All the tramps, trespassers (except 
pothunters), and thieves combined injure the 
farmers less than the farmers injure themselves 
by wanton destruction of birds. Funny, isn't it? 

All the strikers all over the United States, in all 
the strikes and destruction of property during the 
year 1912, did not destroy property to more than 
one-tenth of the destruction wrought by insects 
to farm products. Farmers and fruit-growers 
speak severely of "strikes" and "strikers" in the 
manufacturing towns of the country. What may 
the strikers truly say of farmers and fruit-growers? 



282 An American Fruit-Farm 

People in the country are horrified if told that 
nineteen people — so the report goes — may be 
found living in one room in Pittsburgh. But these 
good country people are not disturbed by the 
slaughter of the birds. Consistency — so the pro- 
verb runs — is a jewel, even (as the French say) 
"when it is made of paste." 

In one season, one San Jose scale will produce 
3,216,030,400 of its kind; this is the law, "each 
after its kind, " with a vengeance. One pair of 
robins — probably the most useful of our common 
birds — may possibly in one season raise seven 
robins. Do you see the difference? But, you say, 
robins do not eat scale. There are other and more 
common scales, plum scale, peach scale, maple 
scale, oak scale, apple scale, cherry scale, black- 
olive scale, greedy scale, oyster-shell bark-louse 
scale (which is the most destructive next to the San 
Jose, and is common east of the Mississippi, and 
is the food of many birds). What birds devour 
scale? Titmice, woodpecker, orioles, thrush, wax- 
wing, warbler, chickadee — many varieties of these 
birds. Scales and insects increase by the millions; 
birds, possibly by the half dozen. Kill the birds 
and let scales and insects grow! r 

And there are farmers who say: "Give us this 
day our daily bread. " There are fruit-growers and 
farmers who demand the presence of experts, and 

1 Read Birds That Eat Scale Insects, a little pamphlet published and 
freely distributed by the Department of Agriculture of the United 
States Government. 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 283 

appropriations from Congress — to do what? To 
serve as artificial birds. Kill the birds and spray 
Bordeaux mixture instead, and get Uncle Sam to 
pay the bills! Funny, isn't it? 

In the public schools of the country there may 
be found some 16,000,000 young Americans, the 
"rising hope of the nation." How many of this 
"hope" ever hear one word of counsel, not to say 
instruction, as to the value of birds to man? 
Thousands of them "collect" birds' eggs and nests, 
not without wanton destruction of bird life, but 
who among these rising millions learns in school 
the lesson of lessons worth knowing, that human 
life depends upon bird life, and therefore the pro- 
tection of birds means civilization? What teacher, 
what board of school trustees knows anything or 
cares anything about this matter? How many 
millions of dollars are paid by the taxpayers to 
train "the rising hope, " and how much is actually 
used to civilize the child as to the use, not to say 
the rights, of birds? 

The word "insects" or the word "fungus" does 
not occur in the Bible. There are thirty-three 
verses, in the King James version, which mention 
birds directly; perhaps as many more which spe- 
cially refer to bird life. We are told that "the 
birds of the air have nests. " This is according to 
St. Luke. How soon must it be said, "The birds 
of the air had nests"? Are clergymen, whatever 
their church or creed, helping preserve the birds, 
"each after his kind"? Are they at any time 



284 An American Fruit-Farm 

instructing their listeners, young or old, in the 
value of bird life to mankind? Or is "slumming" 
more interesting? Or "politics"? Or a course in 
sociology or the "higher criticism"? Or "the 
missions on the Congo"? Palestine is a birdless 
country; it is mostly a wilderness. Why a wilder- 
ness? Clergymen are public teachers of immeasur- 
able influence. Are they "with us or against us" 
in the sane attempt to give the birds a chance? 
There is one text in the Bible from which if the 
preacher does not at once preach he may never 
again have the opportunity, because the text will 
no longer be true. 1 

Sometimes, when clerks break loose from banks, 
stores, and other places, they become "pothunters." 
They want to shoot everything in sight, in the 
bird line, on holidays: robins, thrushes, martins, 
wrens, woodpeckers, pigeons, owls — and so on 
through the list. Why not? Who owns the birds? 
Who objects? Shoot the robin and throw the 
carcass under the bushes! Only a few hundred 
million more bugs to eat up food crops; that is all 
that shooting a robin means. Query: Do clerks 
eat wrens, martins, field-sparrows, robins? 

During the winter of 1911-1912, the "city 
council of Pittsboro, South Carolina, rescinded an 
order forbidding shooting within the city limits so 
that the people might shoot robins that had been 
driven by a severe storm into the town to seek 
food and shelter. About f our thousand robins were 

1 Song of Solomon, ii., 12. 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 285 

killed. The mayor of the city, who was away at 
the time, was so disgusted at what had occurred 
that he resigned his office upon his return." This 
delightful bit of history graces the pages of a bird 
report in a distant State. 1 

Shall all the birds be destroyed? Shall farmers 
and fruit-growers help the destruction and stand 
the loss? How many millions of dollars? Far 
more than the value of all the products of all the 
fruit sections in America. Do steel-manufac- 
turers combine for their own interests? Does the 
Standard Oil look out for its own? Does the paper- 
trust, the lumber-trust, the cotton-trust, the book- 
trust, the woolen-trust, the steel-trust, and so on to 
the end of the trusts, if an end there be? Do farm- 
ers and fruit-growers look diligently out for their 
own interests? Would the Standard Oil, that finely 
organized and well managed concern, deliberately 
refuse to omit anything, however laborious, which, 
if done, would add to Standard Oil values? But 
farmers and fruit-growers kill the birds that feed 
them. They depend upon their labor and their 
crops; they work; they think they work harder 
than any other workers in America. Yet they kill, 
or permit to be killed, the chief source of their 
wealth, — the birds. Indeed, of all the people on 
this planet, farmers do the least in their own in- 
terests. They refuse to get out of time-worn ruts. 
They are suspicious of everybody. They kill their 

1 Report, Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, January 15, 1912, 
p. 28. 



286 An American Fruit-Farm 

best friends. This is not a libel, but a terrible fact. 
And yet the farmer is the most independent man 
in America. 

Every American farmer may risk his last dollar 
on this truth, unpleasant as it may sound, that 
fully one-fifth of his efforts is wasted absolutely 
by the destruction of his products by insects and 
fungi. On many farms the waste is greater than 
this. Powerful -'trusts" protect themselves and 
compel others to "keep hands off." Farmers and 
fruit-growers refuse to protect themselves by 
simply letting Nature alone. Let the birds live! 
Who butters the farmer's bread? Do not forget: 
it was a bird that brought the prophet his daily 
bread. 

We now have more laws protecting birds than 
ever before, but, unless the mind of the people is 
behind them, they remain dead laws. All men who 
are truly fond of hunting are the best friends of 
game and of the protection of bird life. The time 
has come when as a people we must take our choice: 
dead laws, dead birds, dead vines, dead trees, dead 
labor, or living laws, countless birds, orchards, 
vineyards, abundant crops, lower cost of living. 

Meanwhile insect pests and fungi are increasing, 
as they are increasing in every fruit region, in 
every farming region in America. The natural 
check on these enemies is the birds. Why destroy 
the birds? Why not protect them? What fruit- 
grower would refuse a gift of a fertilizer that would 
increase his annual harvest twenty-five per cent.? 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 287 

Or would he reject an offer of labor that would 
work out that increase? But the farmers and 
fruit-growers of the country may have this increase 
for nothing if they will protect the birds. On the 
low estimate of one bird's nest and its brood for 
every acre of land, the birds of Erie County destroy 
in one season of four months — and the ravages of 
worms and their destruction by the birds is for a 
longer period — the enormous total of 125,000 tons of 
insects! This means six hundred and twenty-five 
tons every day during the season. But there are 
more than one nest and a brood to every acre, and 
birds do a greater service than this consumption of 
enemies of orchard and vine. In the single county 
of Erie, and chiefly in the Lake Shore Valley, the 
birds, assuming one pair for every acre of land, 
destroy in one season enough insects to fill a freight 
train fifty miles long, each car holding thirty tons ! 
A similar train may be drawn out of every fruit 
valley in the United States, — by the birds. Shall 
we kill them? Is it even good business to protect 
them? During the season these friends of ours 
destroy thirty pounds of insects on every acre of 
the farm — that is, more than a ton of insects in 
one season on a farm of sixty acres. What fruit- 
grower would like to handle a ton of bugs and 
worms? There are innumerable species of fungi 
which ruin tree and vine, bush and plant, bark, 
root, leaf, bud, flower, and fruit; no part of the 
living plant is exempt. Not all fungi are bird-food. 
We do not know exactly the amount of service the 



288 An American Fruit-Farm 

birds render us in destroying fungi. We do know 
that birds eat the scale — the widespread and 
numerous woodpecker family, the house-sparrow, 
the tree-creeper, the long- tailed tit, grosbeak, 
oriole, warbler, wren, chickadee, waxwing, vireo — 
in all, some fifty-seven varieties of birds, all of 
which feed on the scale. Of these, twenty-seven 
varieties destroy the two most destructive scales — 
the black-olive scale, and the oyster-shell bark- 
louse. Fungi are vegetables, plants, growing from 
infinitesimal seeds called spores, which in countless 
numbers float on the wind and suck the life out 
of other plants. At present our chief defense is 
judicious spraying. 

From 1900 to 1 9 10 the value of farm property in 
the United States increased one hundred per cent. 
— that is, from $20,439,900,000 to $40,991,450,000. 
Dining this period the value of land increased 
one hundred and eight per cent, per acre, but the 
population of the United States increased only 
twenty-one per cent., which means that, relative to 
population, land is acquiring a scarcity value. 
Indeed, the increase in farm values was a significant, 
probably the most significant, increase among all 
the changes in the affairs of the American people. 
Of every one hundred of our people, fifty-four live in 
the country; forty-six in the city. The actual land 
area of our country is just short of 2,000,000,000 
acres, and of this enormous area only twenty-five 
per cent, is improved land. On the other hand, 
forty-six per cent, of the whole is actually farm 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 289 

land. This means that quite one-fifth of all land 
called "farm land," throughout the United States, 
is unimproved. If we consider what "improved" 
really means as applied to land in our country, we 
must admit that farming here is as yet extensive 
rather than intensive, and that bad farming is the 
common practice. 

During the last twenty years an amount of 
capital far beyond accurate computation has gone 
into farming, and this form of investment has only 
begun. The city man who puts $30,000 into a 
farm may now be found in every prosperous 
farming community. Hundreds, thousands of 
farms — fruit, stock, poultry, truck, cranberry, and 
so on through the list — are owned and operated 
by rich men who made their money in banking, 
manufacturing, railroading, medicine, politics, 
patents, speculation; with them the "get-back-to- 
the-land" instinct is dominant. In the Lake Shore 
Valley, and in other valleys, scores of such men 
may be found and almost without exception their 
farms are highly profitable. All over the United 
States such men may be found, and because of 
them a new profession, a new vocation, exists in 
America, that of "farm manager," "superinten- 
dent of the fruit-farm," "horticulturist," and 
thousands of young men are in training on farms 
and at agricultural colleges and special schools to 
fill these positions. This astonishing change in 
affairs goes far to explain how it happens that the 
value of farm property increased between 1900 and 



290 An American Fruit-Farm 

1 9 10 from twenty billion to forty billion dollars. 
Now during this decade there was but a trifling 
increase of land in farms, that is, less that five 
per cent.; for the acreage in 1900 was 838,600,000, 
and in 1910, 878,800,000;' and the increase during 
this time in improved land was only fifteen per 
cent., that is, from 414,500,000 to 478,452,000 
acres. The large fact is that farm-lands increased 
in value chiefly because of better farming. 

No small part of the credit for this increase is 
due to such men as Burbank and Bailey, and 
particularly to the men who have charge of experi- 
ment stations; and to such work as is done by the 
Department of Agriculture at Washington, and 
similar departments of the State Governments. 
Our people seem at last to have awakened to the 
enormous importance and almost infinite oppor- 
tunities and possibilities of farming in its many 
phases. 

What do all these big figures and big facts 
amount to? "Where the treasure is, there is the 
heart also, " says the Book of Books. When the 
American people have an investment of $40,991,- 
450,000 does any one imagine that somebody's 
"heart" is not "there also"? Does any one 
imagine that the millions of Americans engaged in 
farming, if they have any conception of their own 
interests, are going to permit a wanton waste of 
from twelve to twenty-five per cent, of their in- 
vestment annually? Or, will they awaken, save 
this waste, and capitalize it? 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 291 

Does the United States Steel or the Standard 
Oil permit any such waste? Does the Pennsyl- 
vania Railroad, or the Vanderbilt, or the Harriman, 
or the Baltimore and Ohio, or the Pacific? Does 
the Cunard Line, or the American, or the Allen? 
Does any human being, who can be left safely at 
large permit an annual waste in his business of 
twelve per cent.? But farmers and fruit-growers 
permit this waste; they are the guilty party. The 
farmer will fight the railroad when it attempts to 
take in a few rods of his land to widen its tracks. 
He will go everlastingly to law with his neighbor 
over a disputed fence-line when all the land in 
dispute is not worth fifty dollars; and at the same 
time he will suffer himself to be cut off twelve 
per cent, and more every year, and will actually 
superintend the wasting so as to make it larger. 
He kills protective birds himself and encourages 
everybody else to kill them. 

At least twelve per cent, of all our land products 
are yearly destroyed by worms; yet, beginning in 
Texas and Florida and continuing to the Canadian 
border, from ocean to ocean, the wanton and 
wicked destruction of birds goes steadily on. 
Wealth is rapidly retreating to the country, to 
the farm, to better farming and fruit-growing. 
"Things," says Emerson, "refuse to be mis- 
managed long." The increase by more than 
twenty billions of dollars in farm values from 1900 
to 1 9 10 means the necessity of bird protection. 
Owners of such wealth will not tolerate a twelve 



292 An American Fruit-Farm 

per cent, yearly waste of capital. Nothing is 
gained by calling a spade by any other name. A 
spade is a spade; a bird is a bird; a farmer is a 
farmer. A wise farmer is not a foolish farmer. 
But will the wise man forever suffer the foolish 
man to injure the wise man? If the foolish fruit- 
grower or the foolish farmer will not protect his 
own, and thereby he injures his neighbor, shall the 
neighbor submit tamely, quietly, smilingly, and 
charge up the loss and no more, or shall he defend 
his own substantial interests? A wise farmer is 
better than an act of Congress or of Assembly. 
How long will the farmers and the fruit-growers of 
the country slumber and suffer this wanton injury? 
How long will they submit to this yearly loss of at 
least one-eighth of the just results of their labor? 
Are they less capable than the Standard Oil, or 
the Cunard Line, or the General Electric? Come 
on, men of wealth, and buy up the farms! Im- 
prove them. 1 Welcome Burbank and Bailey, 
Experiment Stations, Schools of Agriculture! 
Welcome governments, of Nation or of State! 
Welcome all associations, societies, granges, clubs, 
meetings, books, newspapers, speeches, conversa- 
tions, ideas — welcome all actual thinking that 
favors the protection of the birds ! 

If farmers and fruit-growers do not suffer birds 
to be destroyed, will their profits at the close of 
the year be twelve per cent, increase? This de- 
pends upon how our neighbors act. Our bird- 
neighbors are in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 293 

Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, California, Maine, 
Minnesota, — in every nook and corner of our 
country. Bird-protection is not merely a local 
but a universal need. A fruit-grower may live 
near the northern edge of the country. All the 
way southward the birds are remorselessly and 
wantonly destroyed the whole year through. 
Practically, people living at the North get only 
whatever birds escape our neighbors at the South. 
In Tennessee millions of insectivorous birds, es- 
pecially robins, are killed for fun and for food 
during the time of their migration — February and 
March. The wild pigeon, once best known of 
migratory birds, has become extinct through 
wanton destruction, yet there are thousands of men 
now living who can remember when the sky would 
be darkened by immense flocks of these birds in 
flight to or from their breeding-grounds. Alexan- 
der Wilson computed that one flock of these pigeons 
which he saw passing over Indiana contained 
2,230,272,000 birds! This was two generations 
ago. On September 14, 1908, the last wild speci- 
men was taken near Detroit, "the last that ever 
will reach the hands of man," for not one bird of 
this species is now in existence. Yet, some years 
after Wilson recorded his observations, the Legis- 
lature of Ohio refused to pass any law protecting 
the passenger pigeon on the plea that the birds 
were so numerous they could not decrease, much 
less become extinct. To-day we must add to the 
rapidly increasing list of extinct species of useful 



294 An American Fruit-Farm 

birds — in our country alone — the Labrador duck, 
the Eskimo curlew, three species of the macaw, 
and the Carolina parakeet. And our common birds 
— robins, orioles, sparrows (not the English spar- 
row, that insufferable scavenger, but our native 
species), bluebirds, martins, chickadees, turtle- 
doves, owls, night-hawks — are rapidly perishing by 
indiscriminate and senseless slaughter. 

Ten cents a dozen for robins seems a fabulous 
price to the thoughtless Tennessee mountain boy, 
and to kill thousands of robins in Georgia, Ala- 
bama, and the Border States, generally, while the 
birds are migrating, means a birdless tract to 
the North. The robin, or, properly speaking, the 
thrush, is only a type of the victims. After the 
entire South has spent months in destroying useful 
birds, the entire North takes up the work of 
slaughter and continues it till the last escaping 
bird takes its flight southward into the camp of its 
enemies. The miracle is that a single bird survives. 

A twelve per cent, profit from birds means a 
common-sense treatment of them everywhere and 
at all times. Foolish, selfish, murderous man is 
blind to his dependence upon birds for his existence. 
Every species he kills to extinction only marks his 
progress toward starvation, for he is hastening the 
day when the world will be uninhabitable for man. 
The oceans have northward and southward cur- 
rents, polar and equatorial currents, vast rivers in 
the sea which, starting from the equator, flow 
northward and make the temperate zone inhabit- 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 295 

able, and flowing from the poles toward the equa- 
tor do a like service for the hot regions. Rivers of 
air also flow from the equator to the poles, from the 
poles to the equator, and the motion of the earth 
through space imparts to the rivers of sea and air 
a vast spiral motion so that all regions of the earth 
are reached and affected by this vast circuit of 
aerial and marine ventilation. Not less remarkable 
are the annual bird migrations from equatorial 
regions northward into our temperate zone; south- 
ward into the temperate regions of Asia, Africa, 
and South America. Back and forth this river of 
bird-life flows, and has flowed through the ages. 
It too has its function in maintaining the nice 
balance of life on the globe. Happily we cannot 
destroy the rivers of the sea or of the sky, but we 
are doing our best to destroy the equally helpful 
and necessary river of birds. But — "Stop! Look! 
Listen!" Destroy the birds and in less than 
twenty years mankind will literally "be eaten of 
worms. " 

The world is filling up; the continents and the 
isles of the sea are becoming peopled. There are 
now one hundred millions of people in the United 
States. When George Washington was President, 
and our country was bounded by Canada and the 
Floridas, by the Atlantic and the Mississippi 
River, there were only three million people. How 
long before there will be five hundred million — yes, 
five times five hundred million? You say, "What's 
that to me?" What generation — your children's 



296 An American Fruit-Farm 

children — will be saying, "Oh, that my fathers had 
been wise in their generation!" But we are not 
raising the children of to-morrow — we are killing 
birds. That is our business; let posterity take care 
of itself! But here a footnote from your inmost 
mind: Do you wish that your grandfather, or 
even your father, had been a little more "fore- 
sighted"? Do you blame anybody for using up 
the forests, for polluting the rivers and streams, 
for destroying the game, for wasting the resources 
of the country? No man lives for himself and 
remains a man. 

The annual tide of bird-life sweeping in upon us 
is a diminishing tide; every year, smaller; drying 
up like our rivers and streams; vanishing like our 
forests. Instead of letting this river of bird-life 
cleanse our orchards and vineyards, we scatter a 
pinch of Paris green, spray a tiny stream of Bor- 
deaux mixture, and do the work ourselves. The 
birds would like to do it for nothing, and far better 
than a sprayer. "No, thank you, " says the fruit- 
grower; "no birds for me ! If you see a robin in 
my orchard, 'Off goes his head!' I prefer to kill 
birds and to scold about wormy fruit and to insist 
that Congress shall make a handsome appropria- 
tion to kill the worms. " "Is not the life more than 
meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the 
fowls of the air!" But our eyes are glued to a 
gun barrel. However, if any person should happen 
to hand the fruit-grower in the Valley — doubtless 
in other valleys — a twelve per cent, bonus on his 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 297 

investment, he will be on the spot to receive it, 
promptly, with his bag. 

If after killing our common birds the farmer 
would take the trouble to examine the contents of 
their crops he would discover that forty-five per- 
cent, is insects, thirty per cent, vegetable matter, 
and twenty-five per cent, seeds, chiefly of weeds. 
The contents vary with the season, being greater in 
insects in spring and summer; in autumn, greater 
in seeds of weeds. But man is a killing animal. 
All our folk-lore abounds with stories handed down 
from our remote ancestors of killings of man, beast, 
and bird. What boy, seeing a bird, does not yearn 
to kill it on the spot? A boy, a stone, and a bird; 
a man, a gun, and no bird! Cruelty to animals? 
But we cannot eat our cake and keep it. The 
clock strikes warning; the time has come; we must 
choose between fruit, food, and famine; between 
birds and worms. 

Now birds, like men, must have food. What 
food? Nature, in the wild, supplies her own with 
nuts, buds, leaves, roots, seeds, flowers, and the 
infinite variety of animal species. Species feeds 
on species ; this is the law of life on the globe. We 
have cleared the land and destroyed the sources of 
food for the birds. Much of the so-called injury to 
fruit and other crops wrought by birds is wholly 
due to the necessity we have imposed upon them. 
Forests, shrubs, bushes, weeds, wild fruits, and 
berries and all that world of life on which birds 
feed in a state of nature we have quite destroyed, or 



298 An American Fruit-Farm 

so reduced that the birds must resort to our trees, 
vines, shrubs, and plants, and to the insects and 
fungi which we indirectly propagate — or perish. 
Civilization means largely the disturbance of the 
wild. Civilization shears off natural vegetation 
and introduces cultivated or man-made varieties 
of plants with resulting plant diseases. We also 
compel the insect world to feed upon our plants, 
having destroyed all that vegetable life on which 
it formerly fed. So both insects and birds are 
compelled to forage in our orchards and vineyards. 
What must follow? A bird famine or a man 
famine? Or shall we protect our own interests, 
ward off famine, by raising enough for the birds 
and ourselves also? Bird-food must come from 
insects, fungi, or plant life. What is natural bird- 
food? Elderberries, mulberries, wild cherries, 
pokeberries, Virginia creeper, juniper berries, holly 
berries, hackberries, huckleberries, — and these are 
the natural food of some sixty-seven species of 
birds. Does anybody plant mountain-ash, silver- 
berry, Chinaberry, buckthorn, barberry, pepper- 
tree, snowberry, viburnums, sumac? But these 
are bird-food. Juniper, black-currant, June- 
berry, red raspberry, black raspberry, blackberry, 
sarsaparilla, bird-cherry, hobble-bush, red osier, 
choke-cherry were growing in American valleys 
for ages before La Salle, Father Hennepin, and 
their brave companions caught sight of the "Great 
Lake of the Cats," which we call Lake Erie, or 
discovered the great West. 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 299 

But let us be more particular and look more 
closely at our native bird-food supply: red-cedar, 
mulberry, pokeberry, sassafras, spice bush, black- 
currant, the raspberries, frost-grapes, dogwood, 
blueberries, snowberries — and the list might be 
lengthened. Call the roll. Do any of these wild 
things answer ''Present"? Are any of yesterday? 
Where are the dogwoods, the fox-grapes? Gone, 
and the birds that fed on them. If a man cannot 
get bread, will he eat a stone? Or will he throw 
the stone and eat the bird? If the birds cannot get 
their daily bread will they eat stones? Or will 
they turn to garden and orchard, to field and farm- 
yard, and get wounds to their death? "Yes," 
says the farmer, "but I can't keep my land in the 
wild just to feed birds." "True," replies the 
bird, "but I must eat, and whereas I once fed 
bountifully on mulberries and poke-weed, now I 
must feed on cutworms, cabbage-lice, and some 
tame fruit — very tame." The farmer is loading 
his gun. "But I pay my bills," resumes the bird 
with its weather eye on the gun barrel; "and 
really, I prefer choke-berry to cabbage worms; 
but you, friend farmer — just put down the gun, 
please, till I am through; you have cut down all 
the choke-berry and set all out to cabbages; if 
I can stand the change of diet, certainly you can 
stand — just point the other way, please ! — to let 
me alone." 

1 ' Bang ! Well, that robin won't eat no more cher- 
ries off my trees ! ' ' And Farmer Grimstone reloads. 



300 An American Fruit-Farm 

Listen to our wise friend Professor Bailey: 

The mulberry, of almost any variety, will thrive almost 
anywhere in America, though you better select your variety 
for your special locality. Try the " New American, " called 
also the "Downing." Plant mulberry trees and you will 
have birds and birds and birds, and your orchards and 
gardens will not be molested — at least by birds. Indeed, 
you may have cause to wish that the birds would eat worms 
and let mulberries alone. Mulberries fruit with cherries 
and strawberries and raspberries and early fruits generally. 

For untold ages the inhabitants of Italy, and 
of the shores of the Mediterranean generally, have 
slaughtered birds without discrimination. And 
this wanton destruction of all bird-life is charac- 
teristic of Southern Europe. Anything that wears 
feathers and flies is game and food to the Italians 
in Italy and to all the inhabitants of that vast 
area once the Roman Empire. No habit is more 
deeply ingrained in the Italian than that of slaugh- 
tering birds of any kind. They come to America 
with very loose, if not fantastical, notions of 
"liberty, " — that most abused word of our age and 
country, — and here they immediately proceed to 
kill every bird in sight. Few Americans have any 
conception of the bird slaughter wrought by 
Italians in their own land and by them in this land 
of their adoption. They seem like savages thirsting 
for blood. To them the right to kill birds seems as 
unquestionable as the right to express an opinion 
about the weather. 

Nature made the Italian peninsula a paradise 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 301 

for birds, but any one who has lived there long 
enough to see things as they are, not merely 
wonderful churches, art galleries, and ancient ruins, 
but methods of farming, of horticulture, of market- 
ing; facts of food supply, wages, taxation, — the 
rude, every-day facts of Italian life, — soon discovers 
that Italy has few birds. The wonder is that any 
exist there. 

Start, some May morning, from Menaggio, on 
Lake Como, for a walk up the valley into the moun- 
tains. Your purpose is to climb San Croce. On 
the winding way you cut across the fields. What 
is this rude "rick" or tower you see by the copse 
of bushes? This "Roccolo" embowered amidst 
concealment? As you pass, a low-browed, swarthy, 
ill-kept man, with rings in his ears, opens the low 
door and glares upon you. You have disturbed 
him in his lair. As you came up the hill you heard 
birds whistling, crying, calling to their mates. 
Where are they? None are in sight. Now you 
discover that these cries came from the low, dark, 
shabby tower. You see a sight that sickens you. 
The tower is a trap. The imprisoned birds are 
blind — blinded by the fowler with red-hot wires. 
They are shrieking with pain, calling out in agony 
to any of their kind. Their helpless cries are a 
decoy. A linnet, a fieldfare, two yellow-hammers, 
a red-wing, flying over the land hear the cries; are 
drawn by them toward the tower. See the 
"Roccolo" embowered midst the pretty green 
foliage! The birds fly to the relief of their kind! 



302 An American Fruit-Farm 

Suddenly, the sharp whistling, whirring sound of 
the sweeping hawk! But the hawk is a clever 
device in the fowler's hands, a sort of rattle he uses 
to frighten the victims. They plunge for shelter 
into the copse. Threads! Tangled threads, full 
of pockets, treacherously span the open spaces. It 
is a fowler's net! The entangled birds flutter 
frantically, hopelessly, and hang there, caught. 
All the time the seared and blinded birds within 
the "rick" keep up their piteous shrieking for help. 
The low-browed, dark-handed man snatches the 
linnet, the struggling captives lie with twisted 
necks, a heap of dead song-birds in the corner. 
And if you look closely, you will see the dark- 
faced man thrust a sharply pointed stick through 
the captives' eyes. He is proud of his "catch." 
He shows you two hundred birds in the corner. 
If you will take the trouble, you can see half a 
dozen "Roccolos" from this one, and you can find 
thousands of them all over Italy. One "rick" 
reported ten thousand birds during a single autumn. 
In the vicinity of Menaggio alone the slaughter of 
birds in a single week amounts to tens of thou- 
sands. Sell them? Of course. Go to the mar- 
ket-place, in Florence, Venice, Rome, Padua, Siena 
— go to any market-place in any Italian town 
and you see exposed for sale, regularly, redwings, 
goldcrests, skylarks, yellow-hammers, hawfinches, 
song-thrushes, warblers, linnets, bullfinches, yellow 
birds, redbreasts, wrens, goldfinches, curlews, jays, 
nut-hatches — song-birds, from fifty to a hundred 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 303 

species — for sale in bunches of three, or by the bas- 
ket containing hundreds; and this in any village 
of Italy, Spain, Portugal, or Asia Minor. Game 
birds too? Yes, if they can be had, but Italians, 
Spaniards, wealthy, educated, refined, living in 
"palaces by the sea," boast of a day's plunder, 
hundreds of skylarks, and the like, and consider 
them a choice morsel, as Americans consider 
reed-birds. 

With the millions of Italians, Hungarians, Po- 
lacks, Russians, Arabs, Bulgars, Persians flooding 
America, and bringing with them all the bird- 
killing appetite of centuries of Europe, what is 
to become of American birds? Shall Antonio and 
Joseffy and Oesterglitzyiz literally eat up American 
birds to the extinction of the species, as they have 
done in their native land? Would the farmers and 
fruit-growers of our country like to have the thou- 
sand million dollars lost every year in America 
by the ravage of crops by insects? What are we 
doing to prevent this loss? Does Farmer Jones, 
or Fruit-grower Neville run a "Roccolo"? Does 
either turn "pothunter"? Is Antonio suffered to 
roam at will over the farms cleaning out birds and 
game of every sort? What a man does by another 
he does by himself: this is sound law. What farmer 
lifts his finger, casts his vote, or speaks one word to 
prevent the destruction of birds, even on his own 
land? Who has ever known a farmer who took 
the trouble to protect birds? 

And Antonio in our midst is soon heard from. 



304 An American Fruit-Farm 

As soon as he can, after landing, he buys a gun. 
He wants to kill anything he can cook and eat, 
and he makes no discrimination: robins, crows, 
herons, buzzards, bluebirds, owls, woodpeckers, 
humming-birds, orioles, ducks, — anything that 
wears feathers! Never in history were the birds 
in such peril of extinction, in America, as they are 
to-day. The State of Pennsylvania has had a 
terrible experience with alien bird-killers. Six 
Pennsylvania game wardens have been killed 
and more wounded by ''alien pothunters," though 
the law of the Commonwealth forbids an alien to 
carry, or even to possess, a gun. 

It is a misdemeanor for Antonio — unless he 
becomes an American citizen, which he hastens to 
do — to kill birds. Once he understands civiliza- 
tion of the American type he makes a very good 
citizen. But for centuries in Italy this indiscrimi- 
nate bird-slaughter has gone on. About all the 
birds seen in Italy are in flight across the country. 
Did you ever see a nest of birds, or of eggs any- 
where in Italy? Antonio ate the eggs as soon as 
they were laid ; then he ate the old birds. Do Amer- 
icans want their song-birds consumed off the earth? 

"All very well," says Farmer Joe, "but I don't 
fool along about birds; when I want to shoot 'em 
I shoot 'em; guess it's my land and they belong to 
me. " But the birds do not belong to Farmer Joe; 
they are creatures of the wild and no individual 
can establish title to them. They no more belong 
to Farmer Joe than does the wind that sweeps 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 305 

across his meadow; or the sunshine that colors his 
apples. He might as well bring suit against 
his neighbor because the east wind blew from his 
neighbor's farm as to attempt to make the birds 
his own. And doubtless partly because of this 
incapacity for ownership of birds, every man's 
hand is against them. 

Who said "robins"? What fruit-grower has 
killed seven at one blow, like the famous German 
tailor? Or has boasted that he slew five hundred 
in his cherry orchard? "They took my cherries, 
and I'll kill them," says Farmer Grimstone. 
"They took my strawberries, and I'll kill them," 
echoes Farmer Pennywit. "They cleaned out my 
cabbages; I'll kill 'em, " shouts Farmer Truck. 

And they killed the robins. A crop of dead 
robins. A big crop of cherries? Of strawberries? 
Of cabbages? That depends. But of course kill 
the robins. Why? Because their own crops wit- 
ness against them. Examine and see: 

42% insects — 19% beetles, 10% grasshoppers, 6% 
caterpillars, 7% snails, spiders, angleworms. 

48% vegetable food — 47% wild fruits, 4% cultivated 
fruits (more in June and July than in August) . What wild 
fruits? Dogwood, wild cherries, wild grapes, greenbrier, 
elder, holly, cranberries, huckleberries, barnberries, sumac. 
Ten times as much wild fruit in the robin's crop as culti- 
vated fruit. 

"But I watched him," interrupts Mother 

Grundy; "I saw him take the largest and best 

29 



306 An American Fruit-Farm 

strawberries; just a 'pick* out of each one and 
then go to another; just sampling the whole patch. 
Jimmy, get your gun!" 

Now a farmer or a fruit-grower never makes a 
mistake; never eats the wrong thing at the wrong 
time; never tries to grow three blades of grass on 
soil that will not grow one ; never neglects his trees, 
or his berry-patch, no never. It is always the 
birds, or the wind, or the weather. Farmer or 
fruit-grower never plants potatoes and reaps 
Colorado beetles; or sets a berry-patch and raises 
grubs. But the robin eats one strawberry and nine 
wild fruits and as a digester fills up on angle- 
worms, cankerworms, grasshoppers, caterpillars, 
snails, slugs, spiders, and beetles. Of course, kill the 
robins! Kill them because they eat one per cent, 
of their food from cherry tree and berry bush. 
And then, it is such sport ! Think of the joy, the 
excitement of stalking the robin! What are lions, 
tigers, elephants to robins? And the foolish 
creature persists in nesting year after year right 
under the farmer's nose: in the porch vine, over 
the kitchen door, by the well-curb, in the old 
apple tree where robins nested in grandmother's 
time and with special consideration for the cats. 
What better friend has the cat than the plump, 
stupid mother robin, and the plumper, stupider 
little robins! "I don't shoot robins," remarked 
one virtuous farmer; "I raise 'em for the cats." 
Three broods a year if the robins manage to escape 
the cats, and the farmer, and the fruit-grower, and 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 307 

the farmer's boys, and the fruit-grower's boys, and 
all the other boys, and the hired help, and the 
pothunters, and the "turkey storm," and the 
wind that upsets nests, and sundry mysterious 
enemies that swoop down upon the birds while 
the farmer is at church. 

Watch the old birds. Every minute, from sun- 
rise to sunset, and long in the twilight, they bring 
food to their young, — sixty worms, bugs, beetles, 
moths, slugs an hour. Make your own calcula- 
tion. How many robins at work and eating worms? 
How many pounds of bugs and worms consumed 
during the season? Credit the robin with thirty 
pounds. Would farmer or fruit-grower rather 
have the thirty pounds in his crop or in the robin's? 
And the bird is not a robin after all; it is only a 
thrush. Those Pilgrim Fathers who persisted in 
coming by the Mayflower and in founding New 
England, and in doing various, very various and 
sundry things by themselves and their posterity, 
said, "Robin," when in that first spring time at 
Plymouth, after the most cruel of winters, they 
saw and heard the red-breasted thrush and for the 
first time felt at home in the New World. What 
fruit-farmer in America will not prefer cats and 
pothunters to robins even when they nest in the 
old apple tree? 

A five per cent, loan on good security, with 
punctual payment of interest, is not easy to find. 
The universal law of money-lending, indeed, of all 
investment is, the better the security, the lower 



308 An American Fruit- Farm 

the rate; the greater the risk, the higher the rate. 
Bird-protection means a high rate of interest and 
no risk. Fruit-growers must risk their all for an 
income. A little care and labor invested in bird- 
protection always brings a handsome return for 
the trouble. Strange to say, many farmers and 
fruit-growers do not believe this. Because they 
are unbelievers in this sort of investment, they 
and the world at large are losers. There is an 
ancient saying that none are so blind as they who 
will not see. 

The first step is to let the birds alone. Give 
them the freedom of the farm. Protect them by 
keeping hands off, and see to it that other people 
do likewise. If necessary one can appeal to the 
law of the State, and if there be no State law, 
appeal can be made to Federal law. 

The second step is to encourage birds. Make 
the fruit-farm a bird-sanctuary. Avoid needless 
alarms. Kill cats, but in aiming at the cat be sure 
not to kill the bird. No pothunters; no birds 
killed out of season; no insectivorous birds killed 
at all. Build bird-houses. A tin can will make a 
bird-house, or a little spare time with boards, a 
box, hammer, saw, and nails will result in a bird- 
house and ten per cent, on the labor expended. 
Birds really pay ten and one half per cent.! 

A bird-house duly erected will possibly (not 
certainly) tempt some birds to stay with you. 
Perhaps your reputation among birds is bad "for 
peace and good order"; you may possibly be on 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 309 

their black list. Perhaps the wrens, the martins, 
the bluebirds, the barn-swallows have a poor 
opinion of you. Perhaps they look upon you (and 
your cats and your gun) as avowed enemies. Of 
course you cannot expect a ten per cent, bird- 
profit on demand. Even birds know their friends, 
resent bad usage, and prefer worms on a friendly 
farm to worms and guns on an enemy farm. Try 
it and learn for yourself. A tin can with a family of 
birds within is to be preferred to a yellow, pink, blue, 
red, green, mansard-roofed, laundry, bath-roomed, 
be-porched bird-palace on a purple pole, — and no 
birds. Nail an empty can up in the tree and watch 
results; or, let the thirteen new kittens come to 
cathood and watch results; or, let pothunters 
roam over your place and watch results; or, execute 
State and Federal laws, and listen to your own 
interests, and watch results. And if you wish to 
amuse the children, — of course it will not interest 
you; but if you do wish to amuse the children, some 
rainy afternoon, you might obtain from the De- 
partment of Agriculture, at Washington, — for the 
asking, — a copy of Birds of a Maryland Farm, or 
the handsomely illustrated Birds of California in 
Relation to the Fruit Interests. Dr. Beal, the learned 
author, tells plenty of facts which apply to all parts 
of our country. Of course there is no ignorance as 
to birds in America. Are we not a highly educated, 
Christian people? Why do we want a book about 
birds? Would not what we do not know about 
birds make a book. We kill them right and left; 



310 An American Fruit-Farm 

we fire at them from the upper windows and the 
back door; we set the cats and dogs upon them; 
we encourage our children to destroy them; we 
let pothunters roam over our land to kill them, 
and we kill them ourselves. Providence, we are 
assured, helps those who help themselves, but does 
Providence help those who refuse to help them- 
selves and who do all they possibly can to injure 
themselves? "There's the rub." 

A birdless country is a desert, and any country 
may be made a desert by the destruction of its 
birds. Birds maintain the balance of life; they are 
the police of earth and air. 

On earth: Thrushes (the robin is a thrush), sparrows, 
larks, wrens. 

In air: Warblers, vireos, creepers, nuthatches, wood- 
peckers, fly-catchers, swallows. 

What would we do without the aid of these 
feathered policemen? Will spraying be a substi- 
tute? Will chemicals? Nearly a thousand million 
dollars' damage to crops in America, every year, 
is the answer. Nature sends these policemen ; feeds 
them; always on time and no "graft." Who are 
our common bird policemen? Hawks and owls; 
yes, despite the cooper-hawk and the sharp- 
shinned hawk and the great horned owl, hawks 
and owls are among the best policemen of earth 
and air. Mice, rats, rabbits, moles, flies, noxious 
insects, innumerable, but fifty species of hawks 
and thirty-five species of owls are ever after these 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 311 

marauders. Protect the hawks and the owls; they 
are among our best friends. Every hovering bird, 
happening to fly above the chicken-house, in the 
empyrean blue, is not a cooper-hawk, or a sharp- 
shinned hawk; be sure you are right before you 
shoot. 

Woodpeckers? Yes all woodpeckers except the 
yellow-bellied sapsucker. No policemen on the 
farm are more valuable than the members of 
the great woodpecker family. And these birds 
surpass all others for value in the orchard. 

Warblers? Yes, the entire family, and a very 
large family too. Nothing escapes them — larvae, 
flies, scales, ants, worms, slugs, grubs, bugs, and 
plant lice by the million. Watch a warbler catch- 
ing insects from the underside of a plum leaf, 
cherry leaf, apple leaf, grape leaf, berry leaf, 
and then conclude whether you really want to 
shoot him. 

Thrushes? Yes, all. These are the plump, 
common insectivorous birds, and the robin most 
common of all: hermit thrush, wood-thrush, 
brown-thrush, all friends. Do you protect cut- 
worms, grasshoppers, caterpillars? The thrushes 
will exterminate them if you give them the chance. 

Swallows? Sky-birds, all, and great fly-catchers. 
What has become of the old-time barn-swallow? 
We still have mud and barns. Only seven species 
of the swallow family in the United States and 
six of these east of the Mississippi River. Since 
we have painted under the eaves of our barns, 



312 An American Fruit- Farm 

made them entrance proof to the birds, and made 
war on birds generally, the swallows have some- 
times failed to reach us and are becoming rare. 
But these birds have the record as the chief natural 
enemy of the cotton-boll weevil. The great enemy 
of any of our seven species is the English sparrow, 
a useless, ratty bird that should be exterminated. 
Before the English bird was introduced into the 
country, and for some thirty years after, we had 
our own American swallows. Don't shoot the 
wrong bird. 

I will give some little evidence in favor of the 
English sparrow. Of several bird-houses I set up, 
the English sparrows took possession; the houses 
were compartment houses, accommodating about 
ten families each. Soon after I set them up, — one 
was fastened to the telephone pole, — a wandering 
flock of bluebirds arrived, about 7 o'clock, one 
September morning. They were spying out the 
land, and dozens of them inspected the new quar- 
ters, with seeming intention of engaging them for 
the next summer. My expectations were high. 
The next summer one pair of the bluebirds re- 
turned and leased a smaller house set up over the 
arbor. Here they raised their family in safety, 
and at the expiration of the lease, moved out. 
Jenny Wren had been eying the apartment all 
summer, and had taken an adjoining house at the 
other end of the arbor, but for some reason, she 
was unhappy; perhaps she did not like Quaker 
drab, in which the apartment was painted. But 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 313 

no sooner had the bluebirds removed, than Jenny, 
with a twitter and unconcealed joy, rushed into the 
bluebirds' late quarters and began hauling out 
the nest, scattering it to the four winds and singing 
at the top of her voice all the time. Having cleaned 
the place out, she too departed. The English 
sparrows had taken possession of two houses, and 
as their numbers seemed at least obtrusive, one of 
my household suddenly tore out the rude nests 
they had made hoping to drive the birds away, and 
one of the houses was taken down for a time. On 
the next telephone pole, some distance away, I 
had fastened yet another compartment house, 
somewhat larger than the others. The English 
swallows promptly took possession of this for the 
remainder of the summer. We called it "the 
slums." One pair of the British birds built a nest 
in the open eaves of the north porch, and there 
raised two lusty broods, whose shrieks for worms 
could be heard way down in the cherry orchard. 
I noticed that these English sparrows fed on in- 
sects, worms, grubs, and the like, just like robins, 
quite losing their habits of playing street scaven- 
gers. Robins, wrens, bluebirds, flickers, wood- 
peckers, king-birds, seemed ever quarrelling among 
themselves, but I did not observe that the English 
sparrows either gave or received blows. Perhaps 
it is better to have English sparrows than no birds 
at all. 

Orioles, blue jays, sparrows? The sparrow 
family is said to comprise more than one-seventh 



314 An American Fruit-Farm 

of all the birds in America. They are plain, 
homely, noisy, sociable creatures, chiefly feeding 
on the seeds of weeds. A single tree-sparrow is 
said to consume one ounce of weed-seed a day. 
This means, in a State as large as Pennsylvania, 
the consumption of more than six hundred and 
fifty tons of weed-seed each year by the tree- 
sparrow alone, and there are many other varieties 
of this active family in the Commonwealth. Shall 
we kill sparrows and raise weeds, or kill weeds by 
protecting the sparrows? The blue jay is always 
after the brown-tail moth, the extent of whose 
ravages cannot be estimated in money. The blue 
jay is Nature's specific for this most destructive 
moth. Which shall we have, fruit trees, shade 
trees, and the blue jay, or no blue jay and no trees? 
But there are animals that wear trousers and carry 
guns who — ? and after the gun, — a dead blue jay! 
Bobolinks? Down South the rice-planters con- 
demn them; up North, away from the rice-fields, 
the bird develops an insatiable appetite for all 
sorts of harmful insects. Here at the North we 
must say, "Let somebody else kill the bobolink; 
we need him." 

Crows? Yes, a good friend, the crow. Grass- 
hoppers, cutworms, meadow-mice, countless num- 
bers of these do the crows destroy. After a very 
careful hearing, and the jury out a long time — out 
indeed for years, — the verdict, as reported by 
Uncle Sam, in the celebrated case of "The People 
of the United States vs. the Crow," is: "The 



Birds and the Fruit-Farm 315 

destruction of crows is mistaken policy, for the 
crow performs important services to agriculture, 
and his extermination would be a loss to the 
country." 1 

House wren, phcebe, martin? We used to 
have these cheery policemen about our houses in 
great numbers, but the English sparrows — so it 
is believed — have quite driven them away. But 
whither have they driven them? The British 
birds did not eat them. I strongly suspect that 
the boy and the cat and the man and the gun and 
the English sparrows may account for the sus- 
picious absence of these old friends. But if you 
really believe that the British brown-coats did it, 
then fire away at the brown-coats, perhaps after 
reading that comforting pamphlet published by 
our Government at Washington, on "The English 
Sparrow as a Pest. " Possibly as the British birds 
are now very numerous we have here the way out 
in our demand for something to kill. Boy and 
man thirst to kill something, and here are the 
English sparrows. If perchance in killing them 
you save robins, crows, flickers, mourning-doves, 
woodpeckers, cherrybirds, owls, quail, orioles, 
grosbeaks, martins, bluebirds, let us by all means 
save robins, crows, doves, orioles, and the rest. 
But I may, I must, submit another morsel of 
testimony which may temper wrath against the 
English sparrow. At the corner of the east porch, 
amidst the vine, a Virginia Creeper, — a chippet 

1 United States Year-book of Agriculture, 1907, p. 170. 



316 An American Fruit-Farm 

built its nest and brought forth four young. The 
parent birds were tame, coming to the nest con- 
stantly with supplies; even alighting on our persons 
as we sat near by. One afternoon I noticed 
three birds feeding the brood, but being doubtful, 
I summoned witnesses from the household. We 
all agreed that the old birds had a helper. We 
noticed that when she came, the birdlets were still 
as mice, nor made one peep till long after the 
"neighbor" had gone. It was an English sparrow 
that was helping and that continued to help till 
the last chippet had flown from the nest. Whether 
some mourning widow, or officious neighbor, — 
the "slums" were quite a distance away, — or 
whether the chippets, feeling that they had too 
large a contract on hand, had employed a day nurse 
we never knew. Every fruit-farm should be a 
bird-sanctuary. 



X 

THE FRUIT-FARM AND OLD AGE 

WISDOM, serenity, — and, Macbeth adds, 
"honor, love, obedience, troops of friends," 
should accompany old age, yet such a galaxy we 
rarely see. Youth has slight idea of time; age has 
no other. To youth, age is a port so remote that the 
voyageur thinks, " Time enough for that; it is not 
yet on my chart' ' ; to age, youth has begun a voyage 
so devious, it is idle to presume to mark it out. 
Youth is hope, age is memory; youth attracts, age 
repels. The prince is waiting for the kingdom; the 
heir, for the estate. "Who would have thought 
the old man to have had so much blood in him! ,, 
exclaims Lady Macbeth. "Who would have 
thought the old man would live so long!" exclaims 
the son whose life has been only an expense account 
to his father, who gave more thought to his fruit- 
farm than to his boy. ' ' Something for my old age, ' ' 
says the man in middle-life who has known the 
buffetings of fortune. The fear of want and de- 
pendence makes many a man in the Valley a 
fruit-farmer. The orchard and the vineyard are 
safety; a pension between the man and the poor- 

317 



318 An American Fruit-Farm 

house. Land, Blackstone gravely informs us, is 
immovable, therefore the man fastens himself to 
the land in great hope, as men in shipwreck lash 
themselves to rafts and spars. Security in life is 
the pearl of great price; 

"Yet we all know security 
Is mortals' chiefest enemy." 

Overland, in ox-carts in summer, overlake, 
in sleds in winter, from New England and New 
York came that stalwart band some of whose 
descendants remain in the Valley to this day; but 
most of the land taken up by the pioneers is now in 
the hands of strangers. Many of those who first 
cleared forests and left fields grew old, and fell 
asleep in the Valley, but some, restless as the 
sea, pioneers to the heart of their hearts, like 
Daniel Boone, felt stifled if they saw the smoke 
from a distant hearth, and, leaving their little clear- 
ing, sought the prairies of further Ohio, Illinois, 
Indiana, or the rich lands of Michigan, and some 
passed far beyond the Great River, even to Cali- 
fornia, swelling the company of the Argonauts of 
'49. But they who remained in the Valley and 
grew old among their fields of corn and wheat, 
their flocks of sheep and cattle, watched the world 
roll past their doors and part of it roll back again. 
These were the fathers of the Valley who built 
roads and bridges, churches and schools, and at 
last, forsaking their log-cabins, built fine and yet 
finer houses for themselves and for their children, 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 319 

and, dying, gave each child an ample portion of 
their ample estates. They were the elders, the 
deacons, the 'squires, the colonels of their day: 
large, vigorous men, who did things in a large 
way, and thought little of overcoming difficul- 
ties. They were of the builders of the nation. 

Most grandfathers and all great-grandfathers are 
heroes to their posterity, — Homeric personages in 
the history of the family, — and all more ancient 
ancestors "were giants in those days." This 
exaltation of ancestors was the religion of the classic 
world and remains in much of the religion of to-day. 
To have the right to carry busts of ancestors in the 
funeral procession marked the divine origin of the 
dead Roman and his living descendants. We in 
the Valley do not carry such tokens of divinity on 
our way to the grave, but we enjoy any knowledge 
we think we possess of being fruit of a very ancient 
tree whose roots run deep into European soil. 
Between Adam and the Flood few of us find 
difficulty in tracing descent, but grave embarrass- 
ments arise between the Flood and the American 
Revolution. Happily for all men — and of course 
this includes us within the American Fruit 
Valley, — when Nature fails, man bravely steps in : 
there are nurseries in which genealogical trees of 
any variety may be had, each of its kind, and 
we may add, of its price. But in the days of 
pioneering the fruit-trees in the Valley were not 
from genealogical nurseries; rather did they come 
from the wild. 



320 An American Fruit-Farm 

These pioneers did a greater work than Hercules: 
they planted the seeds of a civilization which bears 
fruit unto this day. They found the Valley as 
La Salle, Celeron, and Father Hennepin saw it, and 
began the transformation that is going on to this 
day. The Valley as we see it was not made in a 
day. We have cleared away remainders and ves- 
tiges of the primeval woods; we have drained wet 
places, built roads, houses, and barns; we have 
changed pasture lands to wheat fields, wheat fields 
into orchards and vineyards, and where yesterday 
the wild deer was speeding like the wind, to-day is a 
sweep of cherry blossoms. This we did with cun- 
ning tools and help of many hands; that they did 
with slow and painful toil, grubbing through the 
tall, thick woods, burning the forest to get rid of it, 
and paying for their land with the pearl-ash which 
they hauled in mid-winter, over a wilderness road 
to Pittsburgh or to Barcelona, where, getting a 
few pieces of silver they made their titles secure. 
And one acre of this land which they cleared with 
such lengthening toil is to-day worth, as the world 
says, more than a thousand acres of the days 
of pioneering. They labored and we enjoy; they 
toiled for us who come more than a century after. 
Their age was our youth; they built the ship and 
began the voyage, and we are making port. 

Generations to come will speak of our labor as 
vast, astonishing, Herculean, and will carry our 
busts in their funeral processions. Yet in the 
Valley — possibly in other valleys — few old men 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 321 

now living were born on the land they now own. 
Land tends to become more and more an article of 
commerce, a utensil, a bale of silk, a yard of calico, 
and so changes hands easily. So frequent is the 
change, the land has slight chance of being a birth- 
place. It takes time to be born as well as to die 
and land must be in the family long enough for 
the event to happen. The pioneers in the Valley 
took time for life; the Valley was their home 
and they looked for no other; they had gone 
West, and the Valley was West. Their dreams 
were of New York and New England, but these 
hills and this lake were before their eyes. A man 
lives in his visions, though they hover over a 
distant sky line and under strange stars. 

" His heart 's in the Highlands, 
His heart is not here; 
His heart 's in the Highlands, 
A-chasing the deer." 

How-busy-soever he may seem to be in the Low- 
lands, he lives in the Highlands. Within this 
round which encircles orchards and vineyards, 
hills and lake, gleaming streams, field and forest, 
the pioneers lived and saw visions and here they 
are buried. 

I remember, years ago, the burial of one of these 
pioneers who for more than half a century had 
lived in an old-fashioned house amidst orchard 
boughs. The logs had been covered more than 
seventy years since with thin, wide clapboards 



322 An American Fruit-Farm 

and the winds and the weather had painted them a 
soft gray. An ancient grapevine ran the whole 
house around, close to the eaves, and tiger-lilies, 
snowballs, pinks, and lilacs were a wilderness. 
The bubbling spring near the door was partly cov- 
ered by a broad, flat stone, and a well-trodden 
path led to it. Within doors the great beams stood 
exposed ; the wide floors were uneven and the win- 
dows had diamond panes and were overshadowed 
by the vine. There was a cavernous woodshed, 
and the swallows twittering in and out; and some 
were diving into the throat of the huge chimney at 
the gable. Under the rude cornice ran the irregular 
line of mud nests, and the roofs were green with 
moss. Thither the pioneer had come in his youth 
and made his home. Here he had brought his 
bride, and here the children were born. They had 
all gone out into the world, leaving the old folks 
alone. On Thanksgiving Day some of them would 
come back to the family reunion, and then the 
long waiting till another Thanksgiving Day. The 
burial of the pioneer was on a peaceful June day, 
not rare in the Valley. All the world was in bloom. 
It had been a peaceful ending of a peaceful life. 
There was the touch of silence in the orchards, the 
hint of loneliness in the air; so silent that, as we 
stood among the lilacs and the pinks, we could hear 
the ticking of the tall clock in the great kitchen, 
near the settle. We were for a moment in an age 
that has passed away. The whistle of the distant 
train seemed a painful, a wanton intrusion. Troops 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 323 

of friends were gathered about, and among them, 
the last of the pioneers who had assembled to bury 
their own. It was a closing scene in the play. 
The house was old; the trees were old; the lilacs, 
the smoke-bush, the lily beds, the grapevine 
wreathing the house, the faces set in retrospection, 
— all, all were old. Youth and modernity seemed 
an intrusion. The venerable dead had spent a 
long life here, slowly growing old and, at last, 
slipping away peacefully. 

Strangers now possess the land; the house, 
abandoned, fell into decay. The spring is choked ; 
the old-fashioned flowers have vanished; the very 
site of the old home is a cornfield. The children 
or the grandchildren never return; all the neigh- 
bors are strangers and even the memories of the 
old home are forgotten. Yet for nearly fourscore 
years it was the old home, and the pioneer who 
transformed the wild came to the ideal old age 
accompanied by "honor, love, obedience, and 
troops of friends." But the children abandoned 
the old home; yes, but that is quite another story, 
a story which the old pioneer himself did not write; 
every man is author of his own ; he could not write 
theirs, and they cannot write his. The son of this 
venerable pioneer died suddenly of heart-failure, a 
prosperous banker, having attained the great age 
of fifty-three; indeed, he was older than his father 
dying at eighty-eight. The pioneer had arteries 
which kept young. 

But every fruit-grower does not reach eight and 



324 An American Fruit-Farm 

eighty, nor does every city banker die at fifty- 
three. The problem is to keep your arteries young. 
Some say. "Eat cheese"; others, "Drink sour 
milk"; others, "Buttermilk"; "Don't worry"; 
"Sleep on the roof"; "Two meals a day"; 
1 ' Avoid extremes ' ' ; and yet others, ' ' Farm. ' ' Old 
age and crafty death, as Whitman tells us, pur- 
sue, overtake, overcome all, — so why seek to es- 
cape! Let us be patient, and, like Seneca, receive 
the messenger calmly. For be it bank or farm, 
factory or the high seas that we affect, we yield at 
last to the enemy. It is the living, then, not the 
dying, that concerns us. 

What has the fruit-farm to offer for daily living? 
Nothing, unless your heart is in the fruit-farm. 
Orchards and vines may mean life to me, but daily 
death to you. You pine for city ways and scenes, 
for these are life to you. Length of years is found 
not exclusively in city or country; old age may be 
found in either. But length of years is not living. 
Lincoln at fifty-six had done more than old Parr at 
one hundred and fifty-two, or, so far as we know, 
more than Methuselah at nine hundred and sixty- 
nine. Caesar, Napoleon, dying at Lincoln's age, 
accomplished more than all the centenarians of 
their time. Alexander at thirty undoubtedly had 
done more than any other youth of man and woman 
foorn. Life cannot be measured by the calendar. 

At Tivoli we are shown vestiges of the summer- 
homes of Horace, of Caesar, of Brutus, of Cassius, 
but the world finds these men in Rome. We must 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 325 

locate a man more definitely than merely by say- 
ing, "He lived on the planet somewhere." The 
region of a man's essential activities is ever small, 
Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and the conquerors 
astonish us by the extent of their triumphs, for 
their influence reaches us also. But there are 
other, even mightier conquerors, not men on 
horseback, spear and sword in hand, war and 
ambition in their hearts, but peace and good will, 
and life and living. The Caesars are the excep- 
tions and the world exalts them as the measure of a 
man. As ridiculous to measure the mouse by the 
elephant as Napoleon by a huckster, or Lincoln by 
a street-juggler. Each after his kind is the law of 
youth and age. Unless common men abound to 
admire, then it were foolish in Caesar to be am- 
bitious. No man cares to smoke in the dark; and 
were we all fishes in Mammoth Cave, what use had 
we for eyes? What would become of costumiers 
were men blind? How much is the world governed 
because of "looks"? Youth is commonly misled 
by exceptions, and many a man never outgrows 
his youth. It is a wise man who knows, believes, 
labors, lives with no thought of Caesar. Our schools 
and colleges have much to answer for, in their 
diversion of youth from reasonable ways by delud- 
ing them in knowledge of Alexander, Napoleon, 
Rockefeller, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Marconi, and 
others, the exceptions among men. The young 
man is fired by the illusion that, having had ex- 
plained to him the activities of men of might, 



326 An American Fruit-Farm 

the rare and exceptional spirits who at intervals 
of long centuries visit this earth, they can do as 
the mighty have done, or, unable to do, shall live 
miserable ever after. Inspiration is not imitation ; 
its coals of fire are original. The old pioneer, dying 
in his home, amidst the work of his hands for 
quite fourscore years, has done his work as well, 
in its kind, as did the foremost man of all this 
world. Let there be a hundred elements in the 
visible universe, one is as important as another, so 
far as we know; radium is no more important than 
nitrogen. Be there a million trees in the forest, so 
far as we know one tree is as important as another. 
The most popular notion abroad in America, "All 
men are created equal," might seem to hint that 
the fruit-farmer is as important as the President, 
so far as we know, and that 

" Each thing in its place is best, 
And what seems but idle show 
Strengthens and supports the rest." 

True, Shakespeare does not sing the equality of 
men; nor does Plato, nor Aristotle, Zeno, Cicero, 
Bacon, nor Spencer. Grotius affirmed the equal- 
ity of sovereigns, and Rousseau and Jefferson 
straightway carried it over among men of all sorts 
and conditions. Equality is the most popular 
doctrine the world has ever known. True or false, 
this doctrine must now and forever be reckoned 
with. All shades of interpretation of the doctrine 
have been made, and they agree that the man him- 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 327 

self, not man as a kind of animal among animals, 
is the principal element. To the man all comes at 
last. The living of one man is as much to him 
as the living to another, whether acreage be small 
or vast, or the menu be bread and cheese or of 
nineteen courses. The fruit-grower is as much 
to the fruit-grower as is the banker to the banker. 
Threescore and ten years on the fruit-farm in the 
Valley mean as much to him who lived them as 
three score and ten years in the bank, or in prac- 
ticing law or medicine to him who lived them. 

Does it follow, then, that as all fruit-growers do 
not die centenarians fruit-growing is a risky busi- 
ness? Does the making and the care of orchards 
and vineyards keep the arteries young? Or do 
stock-raising, wheat-farming, or "a few acres and a 
cow"? If a man would have young arteries he 
must select young arteries to be born from, — not 
merely young arteries, but arteries that keep young. 
One cannot put new arteries into old bodies. The 
flight of time is not stayed by a man's taking title 
to a fruit-farm. But in bringing up a cherry tree 
in the way it should go, a man also determines the 
state of his arteries. Ancestors here play their 
part ; indeed, they really determine all the import- 
ant lines for their posterity. Next to ancestors 
come the man and his habits, or, say, his bundle 
of habits, — which is the man, — and next to the 
man the orchard and the vine. Of these habits 
thinking is most tyrannical, for he is as he thinks. 
There is an imperfect translation of this line, — 



328 An American Fruit-Farm 

"As a man eats so is he." One must be careful 
in his translations. The habits of ancestors 
become arteries on the fruit-farm. It might seem 
that a man might know as much as a bird and 
eat what will agree with him; or, like a plant, 
assimilate only food and nourish. Animals feed 
as they live, by instinct. If the fruit-grower's 
instincts are normal, will his arteries keep young? 
This too depends upon the man. If he enjoys life 
on the fruit-farm; if he lives in his trees and his 
vines, wise, serene, amidst troops of friends, sum- 
mer, winter, spring, and autumn, storm and sun- 
shine, he will find his arteries in the fruit-farm, as 
young as he makes them. Where his vision rises 
there it rests. The Valley is his country; its hills 
bar away the world; its lake divides him from a 
foreign land. He sits beneath his own vine and 
cherry tree, hears of wars and rumors of wars, 
but the Valley is peace. He has his anxieties, 
supreme at the moment, trifling when past. He 
feels himself anchored to safety — his fertile acres. 
The fear of want he never knows. Nor indeed if 
he is a thinking man, does he sigh for impossible 
riches, for he can never obtain wealth beyond the 
limits of the business he is in. Wealth is the profit 
on labor; the more the laborers, the greater the 
wealth. Oil kings profit by everybody's labor; 
so too the steel-kings, the cotton-kings, the beef- 
kings, and all other kings who monopolize the 
activities of countless thousands of workers. The 
seamstress, working by the midnight lamp, en- 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 329 

riches the oil-king, as does the ocean-liner, or the 
dreadnought whose black smoke breathes of burn- 
ing petroleum. But the fruit-grower can have no 
like monopoly of labor. 

If he is laboring for great riches, he is hardening 
his arteries in vain. Now the struggle for riches 
is the chief hardener of arteries in any vocation ; it 
is the fatal habit. Not infrequently such harden- 
ing of the arteries occurs early in life, and few who 
drive fast and furious in chase of wealth survive 
threescore. The precise date is fifty-six; why so 
fatal I do not know. But necrology tells this 
perpetual story. Even fruit-growers cease at 
fifty-six, or younger, if they have quite solidified 
their hearts, to say nothing of their arteries, by 
striving for riches. 

Honor, wisdom, love, obedience, troops of friends, 
distinguish old age, yet we have known aged persons 
distinguished by other qualities and possessions. 
We have known old men not wise, but foolish; not 
serene, but restless; not surrounded by troops of 
friends, but with difficulty attended by a hired 
nurse. Even in the Valley, years do not always 
bring the philosophic mind. The reason is plain: 
few men are philosophers; few at any time are 
wise, at all times serene, or ever attended by troops 
of friends. Old men are precisely what they have 
made themselves. The vocation does not change 
the man. A querulous youth becomes a querulous 
old man, unless he undergoes a process of elimi- 
nation. Peach trees cannot do it for him, nor 



33<> An American Fruit-Farm 

grapevines. The fruit-grower may make a tree 
fruitful and miss being fruitful himself. There 
is a hint of serenity in an October tree, weighed 
down with golden fruit ; there is a hint of troops of 
friends in the apple tree in full bloom, the bees 
humming among the branches. There is a hint 
of wisdom in the fruit-farm well-placed, well-made, 
well-tended, trees and vines shining in vigor. 

But every plant has its enemies: insects, fungi, 
beating sleet, crushing winds; it is attacked in 
earth and air, in bud and blossom, in leaf and fruit, 
bark, twig, and root. The wonder is it survives. 
Perhaps, could we see our own race as we see plants, 
we would wonder that there is a human being left 
on the earth. That the race survives is the miracle 
of life, — whether of plant or animal. 

Does the fruit-farmer care for himself as well as 
he cares for his vines and trees? Here is the su- 
preme question, and the answer is the man himself. 
He too fades as a leaf, but next year the leaves burst 
forth afresh. The tree too runs its cycle; it falls to 
earth again to become part of the soil and food for 
later generations of its kind. The question of ques- 
tions is, " If a man die shall he live again? " " As the 
tree falls, shall it lie so?" The one we answer in 
faith and hope ; the other Nature answers before our 
eyes and in our own experience. If there be any 
difference between the tree and the man, it is think- 
ing that makes it so. Of what then can the fruit- 
farmer think? Of grapes, cherries, peaches, only? 
or of himself? And not of himself solely but of 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 331 

himself in human relations — those relations which 
Shakespeare tells us mark green old age, "love, 
honor, obedience, troops of friends." We come 
then by way of orchard and vine to the man him- 
self, having long since passed the cherry tree. 
That is hanging full of scarlet balls amidst the 
green, fine product of Nature's craft. Is he also 
fruitful, a spirit abounding in the humanities? 
Is he symbolized in his cherry tree? 

A very mean man may raise very fine cherries, — ■ 
sweet cherries, not English Morellos, — and a very 
good man may have no cherries on his trees, not 
even Morellos. There lived, long years ago, in 
the Valley a valiant pioneer named James Smed- 
ley, a Yale man of the old type, a medical son of 
Eli. He was always eloquent of temperance. 
"But, Doctor," said Halsey Taylor to him one 
day, the hot sun streaming down upon them in the 
barley field, "how is it that you, who are so strong 
a temperance man, raise so much barley?" 

"Why, young man, reason enough! Reason 
enough! I raise barley for seed!" 

In the search for old age one is not compelled 
to travel by way of a fruit-farm; he may reach 
it by any route, anywhere; indeed, give him time, 
and he cannot miss it. There are routes and routes. 
Were he to choose, which would he take? Did 
fruit-growing lead to perpetual youth, all the world 
would be fruit-growers. It is accident, promise, 
volition, profit, each and all which lead him over 
the route. When we consider the perils he will 



33 2 An American Fruit-Farm 

risk, it would seem that the supreme determinant 
is the hope of gain. Hasten not to be rich. He 
is foolish who heaps up riches, for he does not know 
who shall scatter them. The life is more than 
meat. The lilies are clothed more gorgeously than 
was Solomon in all his glory: ancient sayings, all 
and doubtless true, once, in very ancient times, 
but not in these days of peril and struggle for 
existence! In the Valley these sayings have been 
current — at least on Sundays — for more than a 
hundred years. Fruit-growers have heaped up 
savings only to be scattered by strangers, or wasted 
by the children for whom they were so painfully 
saved. Easy come, easy go, is the law of the 
Valley. To appreciate a fruit-farm, one must 
make it out of the sweat of his brow. Cost 
nothing, worth nothing. Build the house a little 
at a time as you prosper and it becomes a temple; 
if an inheritance, a gift without associations, it 
means no more to you than a freight-car. The 
less you have in the house, the more boldly you tear 
it to pieces; and the more you change it, the more 
it is yours. 

The fruit-farm is the embodiment of threescore 
and ten years' labor; it resembles the owner. 
When it is a living memory it attains its highest 
value in his eyes. Having lived a lifetime among 
its trees and vines, he has reformed it many times, 
so that like a chain it lies in links of construction, 
and each link is a period of life. Here age reads its 
diary and every bush and tree is a memory. Here 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 333 

Annie lost her ring; there Bob caught the rabbit; 
yonder is what is left of the old deer path; this is an 
Indian spring; that row of apple trees I planted 
the year the war opened, and this cherry tree by 
the porch I sent home in a letter from near Fred- 
ericksburg, before the battle. Mother planted it. 
We never thought it would live. When I got out 
of the hospital it perked up and began to grow. 
We always called it "General Hooker," and a fine 
tree it is, — when it bears. These grapes I raised 
from the cuttings and I cut the posts and stakes 
myself when we cleared the piece of timber east of 
the grove. What? Why that is my Washington 
peach. Colonel McLane gave it to me while he was 
in Congress; he brought it from Mt. Vernon. And 
so the old man goes on from tree to tree, vine to 
vine, over the whole farm, associating everything 
with some tender memory. The whole farm is a 
bundle of associations, — not yours, nor Annie's, nor 
Robert's, but his. It is his world. There comes 
a time when a man's thoughts return to the scenes 
of his youth; the fruit-farm is the scenery of a long 
life. 

I have known young people in the Valley who 
furnished their house, when they started life 
together, with antique furniture — anything old 
would do. Most of the equipment they purchased 
at one blow in an antique shop in Salem that is 
skillful in giving the hundred-year touch to the 
product of the shop in the back-yard. The zeal for 
association may become a passion; some people 



334 An American Fruit-Farm 

care nothing for their great-grandmother, but they 
would like to have her silver spoons; others pay 
liberally for anybody's old table. Some like to 
think, as they sit at the Chippendale desk: 
"Here my father wrote; and his father, and his 
father's father." There is the nice suggestion of 
continuity and a dim impulse toward ancestor- 
worship, — a sort of return to first things. Who 
does not make a more cautious bid or play a better 
game if the card table came over in the Mayflower? 

The man who has grown old on his fruit-farm 
lives in daily communion with an unseen world — 
his yesterdays; and no man's life is so interesting 
to him as his own. "Leave the old farm?" he 
answers when some one would buy — "Yes, when 
I leave the world!" "Leave the farm?" says the 
heir, to whom it is only bushes and bother — "Well, 
you just offer me a price and see!" He parts with 
his inheritance like Esau. No man willingly sells 
his life, and associations are life. The stranger 
cannot buy them; the heirs cannot sell them, be- 
cause they were never theirs. Even the old man 
cannot part with them, for they are he himself. 

At the Pennsylvania Historical Society in Phila- 
delphia there is a death mask of Napoleon. Not 
many years ago an aged man might have been 
seen on the eighteenth of June, standing, hat in 
hand, gazing reverently upon the mask. It was 
George Nieman, private secretary to Blucher, dur- 
ing the hundred days. He fought at Waterloo ; he 
captured the iron carriage used by the Emperor 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 335 

and now displayed at Madam Tussaud's; and he 
kept a diary of his hundred days. Translated, it 
was published in the English Historical Review. 
Most interesting its incidents. At the grand 
charge of the Imperial Guard under Ney, Blucher's 
horse was shot and the old General was pinned 
to the earth beneath him. Nieman threw his own 
cloak over the prostrate General and the French 
surged over him, never suspecting, and Blucher 
was unharmed. "Now," so runs the journal, 
describing events before the battle of Ligny, "we 
had Napoleon before us and he was equal to an 
army of 30,000 men." Once a year the aged 
man came to the rooms of the Society. The Libra- 
rian would open the doors of the iron closet, take 
out the death mask and, retiring, leave it for the 
veteran of Waterloo to gaze on. Not a word 
would he speak. Silently he lived again his hun- 
dred days. Again he witnessed the charge. Again 
he was at La Haye Sainte and Wellington and 
Blucher were grasping hands. Again he was 
entering Paris with the Allies and the five Kings, 
and again he was with them at the grand opera. 
To me who translated and published the veteran's 
diary, this death mask meant only a name; a day 
spent on the field of Waterloo; an autograph, a 
book, and petty relics of the exiled Emperor; but 
to the aged German Lieutenant it meant the most 
dramatic experiences of a lifetime. It was his 
supreme association. 

To the man who for many years has lived 



33 6 An American Fruit-Farm 

amidst orchards and vineyards, they become 
like the mask of Napoleon to the veteran of 
Waterloo. That great event was his event, his 
victory. So these trees, these vines, this equip- 
ment for living in the Fruit Valley becomes the 
old man's great event, — his victory. Scant enough 
is the consideration given to old age to-day. 
Even in the Fruit Valley, where life moves with 
even and prosperous current, the aged seem to the 
young somewhat an encumbrance. Commercial 
greed has penetrated the Valley and the young 
are impatient to possess the land. Nor is age 
unconscious of this. It feels the chill, not of years 
alone, but of greed and discourtesy. Children and 
youth are now the supreme rulers, and for them 
and them alone the world exists. The restlessness 
of mere bodily motion, the intoxication of mere 
diversion, are the cravings of the hour. "More 
money and more fun!" is the cry. Life is a 
cheap, boisterous merry-go-round; a perpetual 
sojourn in Vanity Fair. Old age is not senility 
if only it can hold a hand at bridge. But youth 
insists on being in at the making of the will. 
"Give me my portion of goods!" it cries. The 
orchard, the vineyard, the cherry tree mother 
planted, the apple orchard father set out, are only 
money-makers, not beautiful plants which living 
hands set out and loving hearts tended many, 
many years and made precious by thought and toil. 
There is only one book in the world — the cash- 
book; only one account — the bank-account. Old 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 337 

age, even when rich, is a burden on the family, and 
penniless old age is a nuisance which the public 
must abate. The children fly out into the world; 
father and mother are sent to the poorhouse; they 
committed the unpardonable offense of being poor 
and growing old. 

In the Valley, if men are young at sixty, they 
are also old at thirty. Boys and girls at eighteen 
have lost the bloom of youth. Commercialism 
drives the schoolgirl into an office to pound away 
her life on a typewriter, and to the end of her days 
the atmosphere of that office hangs about her. 
There is the inestimable loss of femininity which 
she can never make up. The boy plunges into 
the world at eighteen and is gray, wrinkled, and 
sordid at thirty. He is older than his grandfather, 
and has learned lessons which the orchard and 
the vine never teach. Between the young people 
and the old there is a great gulf fixed and neither 
can — even would he — pass over to the other. 
The boys and girls are like peaches trigged out in 
market with fancy paper covers in natty baskets, 
but we know that the bloom has been rubbed off 
and that the fruit is stale. And we decline further 
disappointment by not searching to the bottom of 
the basket. But somebody buys the peaches, — 
possibly on a bargain counter. As we wander 
through the stalls, we are thinking of the days when 
we picked real peaches from real trees, each after 
its kind. 

Nature always has her winnings at the end of the 



338 An American Fruit-Farm 

game. Cheat her and we cheat ourselves ; play fair 
with her and she rewards us bountifully. Forget 
to feed the peach tree and Nature forgets to put 
any bloom on the peaches. In vain we deck the 
branches with bits of glass and colored paper; 
quality and bloom are not. Forget to feed the 
boys and girls and Nature forgets to beautify 
them with the indescribable charm and bloom of 
youth. The shoemaker makes shoes, not chil- 
dren's feet; the milliner makes clothes, not girls' 
bodies. Nor can factory and physician together 
take the place of Nature. 

Even young fruit-growers go to Carlsbad to 
drink the waters at the hotels. Grandfather 
drank from the Indian spring on the farm, but 
he missed Baden Baden. Is life a fable agreed 
upon? A product of the factory? A creation of 
the Patent Office? In days not so long since past 
it took seventy years to make a man old. We do 
it in half the time now, in the Valley, — perhaps 
in other valleys. Then it took a week to reach 
New York; now half a day. Then it took seven 
years to learn a trade; now no time: men are born 
mechanics and resume practice without notice. 
Then one man worked for another for wage agreed 
upon between them; now he refuses to work, but 
demands the wages. Then butter was eleven 
cents a pound ; now it is sixty, and, like a cheap 
piano, "assembled" in a factory. Then schools 
were few and learning was desired ; now schools are 
many, nobody studies, and all get a degree. Then 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 339 

men worked for a living, now the best player has 
the largest salary. Then children were seen, not 
heard; now children only are heard and seen. 
Then old age was venerable; now, like Mrs. 
Skewton, it is made up for the day, often falling 
to pieces if jarred. Then sermons were an hour 
long; now they are a bore of fifteen minutes, and 
in summer in the best churches both sermon and 
preacher are omitted. Then the father was the 
head of the house ; now it is the cook. Then men 
and women grew old among their orchards and their 
vines and were reverently gathered to their fathers 
by their children; now the undertaker buries them 
by electricity and the children telegraph: "Regrets, 
previous engagement, but send copy of the will by 
return mail, please. " Then the old faith ; now the 
new doubt: ever saving then; ever spending now: 
paying for the farm then ; mortgaging the farm now : 
old and young struggling to build the home then; 
now the young folks living in apartments, and the 
old folks all alone on the farm. But it is the same 
old world; only the folks are the latest novelty. 
Ours is ancient Athens in modern dress: all 
spending their time in hearing some new thing. 
That the world is fixed in its ways no one 
can doubt, and fruit-growers cannot change them. 
We come ever to the man at last. He grows old 
despite orchards and vines, but gracefully, with 
them. He fades as a leaf, but the leaf has grown to 
perfection during its life of a season. It has kept 
its cycle. Much has been written as to man's 



34° An American Fruit-Farm 

natural vocation. Hunting? Fishing? Grazing? 
Farming? Bartering? Fighting? Commerce? 
Science? Law? Medicine? Engineering? Writ- 
ing? Is it anything? Is man by nature a fruit- 
grower? In the old days of pioneering, his supreme 
function, in the Valley, was clearly stated by the 
answer to the first question in the Westminster 
Catechism. Then the chief end of man was "to 
glorify God and enjoy him forever." In the Valley 
now, quite all that is left of the direction is "to 
enjoy! " Indeed, to-day a heaven without a Mid- 
way Plaisance would be no heaven at all. Then, a 
heaven with pleasure would have been an embar- 
rassing surprise. If there is the old earth there 
is also the new heaven. Each generation sees its 
own earth and conceives its own heaven. The 
children in the Valley to-day do not see with the 
eyes of pioneers. Could those worthies return 
to the Valley, — or possibly to other valleys, — they 
would not, they could not, see their world. Long 
as the oldest of them lived, — and I remember two 
centenarians, — they witnessed only the strange- 
ness of change; the faculty of adjustment had 
wholly failed them. This is growing old, — the 
increasing feebleness of adjustment. Perfect ad- 
justment means immortality. The aged man may 
have managed to adjust himself to new condi- 
tions for many years, when suddenly his power 
ceases; his collapse may be wholly physical; his 
mind is still attuned to the rhythm of men and 
things. Here is the cue to old age, a sound mind 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 34 1 

in a sound body; even a sound mind in an unsound 
body. It is not the most powerful mind in the most 
powerful body, but simply the sound mind respon- 
sive to Nature till the end. Not Plato's mind, for 
that was his alone; nor Samson's body, for that was 
Samson's. But your mind in your body, in your 
world. Perhaps your world is the Fruit Valley; 
mere locality makes no essential difference. I am 
thinking of men and women who grow old fruit- 
fully, — performing their functions till the close of 
life's last day, each after its kind. For every man 
has a natural life, if he but knows, and his supreme 
function is to live that life. Is it to be old at thirty 
or at eighty? Is it to use up the springs of mind 
and body while yet in the dew of youth? 

The uselessness of old age and the indifference 
towards it, to-day, in the Fruit Valley, — and possi- 
bly in other valleys, — are the natural result of ways 
of living. Old age reaps what it sows. Did the 
pioneer labor for meat and raiment only? Was 
yesterday's thought in the Valley to have greater 
riches to-day? Where else in the world are such 
wonderful gardens, flowers, walks, vistas, as at 
Monte Carlo? And there are other things at 
Monte Carlo also. Some of these are not shown. 
They are not even reported. They are buried in 
haste. 

Youth to-day is the product of yesterday. The 
fathers labored for riches and many of them quite 
forgot, the while, for whom they were toiling. 
Neglected children attract less attention than 



34 2 An American Fruit-Farm 

neglected orchards and vineyards. We hear of 
"the run-down farm, " not of the "run-down" son 
or daughter of the farmer. We hoe the garden 
industriously and let the children and even our- 
selves run to weeds. And then, when the boy and 
the man, the girl and the woman are choked by the 
weeds, youth is old and broken before its time, and 
old age has not "love, obedience, and troops of 
friends." 

"My orchard runs to apples," said one fruit- 
grower to another, in the Valley, one morning, a 
touch of contempt in his voice; "And mine," replied 
his neighbor, "runs to boys." Paradoxical as it 
may seem, the object of a fruit-farm is not to raise 
apples, grapes, peaches, berries, or cherries, but 
boys and girls, men and women, youth and old age. 
He has the best fruit-farm who raises the best fruit. 
When, at last, come Old Age and crafty Death, as 
surely they will come, by its fruit the fruit-farm 
and the farmer are known. It is not his bank- 
account but his boy that is the real asset or lia- 
bility of his life. Here cluster all associations ; here 
center all memories. The men and the women who 
live for the children, just as robins live for young 
robins, have lived naturally. But the life is more 
than meat and the body than raiment. Wisdom 
is the principal thing and the best fruit-farming 
is understanding. Spreading orchards and rolling 
vineyards are fair to see and fruitful, but their real 
beauty and fruitfulness are in the use made of them. 
" Here a man grew! " marks the site of earth's great- 



The Fruit-Farm and Old Age 343 

est, most famous places. Ancestor-worship, the 
most ancient religion of the race, is a product, an 
early product, of belief that a man is the finest fruit 
this planet can bear. The valley which produces 
the best men and women is the valley in which to 
live and die. Youth or age there is sacred. None 
too young, none too old for reverence. The price 
of living is above rubies. There the fruits of the 
earth grow to perfection, every tree and vine 
producing after its kind. One of the choicest, the 
rarest fruits of the Fruit Valley is Old Age, accom- 
panied by "love, honor, obedience, and troops of 
friends." 



INDEX 



Adam Bede, 26 

iEneid, 25 

Age of Fishes, 182, 192 

Agricola, 25 

Agricultural Colleges, 22, 24 

Alaska, 196 

Alsach (Alsike) clover, 140 

America as fruit-producer, 126, 

127 
Ammonia, 204 
Angelo, Michael, 25 
Anthracnose, 108 
Antiquary, the, 26 
Appendicitis, 64 
Apples, varieties, 87 
Argonauts of '49, 318 
Aristotle, 214, 326 
Ashes, 95, 184, 204 
Atlantic City, 82 



B 



Babylon's Hanging Gardens, 59 

Bacon, Sir Francis, 326 

Bailey, Professor, cited, 208; 

quoted, 300 
Barnyard manure, 140, 142, 149, 

180, 184, 185, 186, 197, 198, 

207, 266 
Baskets and packages, 1 47 
Beal, Dr., cited, 309 
Beethoven, 25 
Berries, 85, 86 
Birds, and aliens, 303; and public 

schools, 283; bird-life, tide of, 

296; bird sanctuary, 308, 316; 

blackbirds, 275; bobolinks, 314; 

bulletins, 309, 315; cats, 298; 

chippet, 315, 316; consumption 

of insects by, 277, 307; crops, 

contents of, 305; crows, 314, 



315; destruction of, 291, 293; 
doves, 315; English sparrow, 
312, 315; extinction of, 294; 
game- wardens and, 304; in 
Italy, 300; jays, 313; Lane law, 
272; martins, 315; orioles, 313, 
315; passenger pigeon, 293; 
phoebe, 315; pot-hunters and, 
278, 304; robins, 276, 277, 294, 
306; swallows, 311; tanager, 
276; thrushes, 310, 311; value 
of, 272-316; varieties, uses, 
310; woodpeckers, 276, 311, 
315; wren, 315; and see 272-316 

Birds of a Maryland Farm, 309 

Birds of California, 309 

Blackberries, 108 

Bluecher, 335 

Bone, 202 

Book-farming, 163, 165 

Boone, Daniel, 318 

Bordeaux, mixture, 156; tables, 
160; see also under Spraying 

Boys and the fruit-farm, 211- 

239. 338 
British Columbia, 40 
Bronze Age, 35 
Bulletins for fruit-raising, 153, 

154; list of, 173 
Bumper crops, 18 
Burbank, Luther, cited, 24; 208 
Buried seeds, 195 



Cassar, 51 

California, 47, 126, 318 

Canterbury Pilgrim, 14 

Cato, cited, 12, 29, 58, 122; 

quoted, 40, 166, 167, 210 
Cats, 278, 298 
Celeron, 320 
Central America, 40 



345 



346 



Index 



Cervantes, 215 

Chautauqua Fruit Belt, 42, 43 

Cherries, diseases of, 157; pruning, 

135; varieties, 94 
Charlevoix, 45, 97 
Cicero, 326 
Clay land, 138 
Climate, 33; belt, 36; importance 

of, 62, 209 
Coal-measures, 192 
Coddling-moth, 275 
Concord grape (see Grapes) 
Carboniferous Age, 42 
Cornell University, 120 
Cover-crop, 22, 143, 144, 145, 

149 
Cropping the land, 200, 232 
Curculio, 156 
Currants, 109 



D 



Darwin, Charles, 278 

De Candolle collection, 21 

Denonville, 45 

Destruction by insects, 280; by 

scale, 282 
Devonian Age, 42, 182 
Dobbins, Captain, 240 
Drainage, construction, 78, 79; 

importance, 77, 85, 1 89, 248, 

249 
Dry farming, 190 



E 



Earthworms, 278 
Edison, 53 

Employers' Liability Act, 129 
Emerson, quoted, 26 
English Historical Review, 335 
Erie County, 45 

Experimental Stations and Schools, 
153, 164, 165, 187, 208, 235 



F 



Farm buildings, 260, 261 
Farm management, 25 
Farm valuation, 288, 289, 290 
Fertilizing, 19, 20, 183, 197, 202; 
tables, 204, 205, 206, 207, 248 
Florida, 47, 126 
Florida rock, 202 



Franklin (Poor Richard), cited, 
215; quoted, 56, 213 

Fruit, quality desired, 131, 135 

Fruit-farm, a clock, 14; accessi- 
bility, 67; associations, 8, 11, 
317-343; care of, 57; cultivation 
of, 131-174, 255; enemies of, 
152, 153; planning the, 71-112, 
30, 31, 72, in; scarcity value 
of, 12; selecting the, 33-70; 
supreme rule of, 5 

Fruit-farmer, and the boy, 220- 
228,342; and birds (see Birds); 
the model, 240-271; and his 
farm, 68, 69, 317-343 

Fruit, nature of, 192 

Fruit-raising, artificial, 54, 55; 
process, 60; quality, 147; secret 
of, 250, 255; (see "Neville 
Farm") 

Fungi (see also Birds, Insects, 
Scale, Spraying), 41, 75, 91, 
101, 108, 150, 151, 152, 153, 
154, 156, 158, 161, 230, 242 



G 



Gage's Gulf, 182 

Garden of Eden, 215 

Girls and the fruit-farm, 211-239, 

338 
Glacial Period, 65 
Gooseberries, 109 
Grapes, 95-105; trimming, 138; 

diseases, 158; roots, 141 
Great American Desert, 97 
Griffon, the, 45 
Guano, 204 
Gypsy-moth, 275 



H 



Hamlet, 51 

Hardpan, 188 

Harrison, Fairfax, 41, note 

Hedges, 265 

Help (see Labor) 

Hennepin, 45, 320 

Hog's Back, the, 97, 182 

Homer, 21, 25 

Hull House, 54 

Humus (see Fertilizer, Soil), 17, 
22, 141, 143, 172, 176, 194, 201, 
205, 208, 209, 230, 232, 233, 
234. 255 



Index 



347 



Iliad, 25 

Insects (see Birds, Scale, Spraying) 
Intensive farming, 15, 240-271 
Italy (birds), 300, 301 



Jefferson, cited, 326; quoted, 27 

K 

Kainit, 207 
Keeping young, 327 
Kalbfus, cited, 276 



Labor conditions, 114; fundamen- 
tal question of, 119; locality, 
116; season, 115; treatment of, 
123 

Lacustrine, 21, 23 

La Hon tan, 45, 97 

Lake Como, 301, 302 

Lake Dwellers, 21 

Lake Erie, 139 

Lake Geneva, 21 

Lake Shore Valley, 12, 16, 30, 34, 
37; described, 42-47; berries in, 
no; labor in, 117; location, 
126; spraying in, 128; altitude, 
139; adapted to grapes, 155, 161, 
171; geology, 182 

Land, feeding the, 18, 19, 141, 
142, 175-210 

La Salle, 45, 46, 97, 320 

Leaf -hopper, 158 

Lines of trade and travel, 37 

Longfellow, quoted, 326 

Louis XIV, 54 

Law, John, 241 

Lucullus, 54 

M 

Mayflower, the, 9, 334 

Managgio, 301, 302 

Michigan, 47 

Mill, J. S., 214 

Mississippi Bubble, the, 241 

Montmorenci cherry, 6 (see 

Cherry) 
Muriate of potash, 207 



N 



Napoleon, 27, 214, 324, 325, 335, 

336 
"Neville Farm," 243-271 
Newton, Isaac, 215 
New York Evangelist, the, 21 
New York Tribune, the, 262 
New Jersey, 37 
New Zealand, 39, 40 
Nitrate of soda, 107, 184, 193, 

202, 203 
Nitrogen, 22, 172, 187, 200, 201, 

202, 204, 205, 207 
Notes on Virginia, 27 



O 



Orchard, cultivation, 148, 149, 
150; planting (spaces), 74; 
setting out trees, 81, 82, 84; 
trimming, 135, 136, 249 



Package law, 129 
Palestine, 284 
Parton, quoted, 215 
Pears, 87; blight, 88 
Pennsylvania, 39, 47 
Pennsylvania R.R., 128 
Perry, Commodore, 46, 240 
Phosphate, 193, 200; see Fertilizer 
Phosphoric acid, 172, 201, 202, 

204, 205 
Pittsboro, S. C, 284 
Plant food, 83, 179, 180, 184, 192 
Plants, food, 180; our ignorance 

of, 193, 194, 195; growth, 178, 

179, 184 
Plato, 215, 326, 341 
Plums (prunes), 89, 90, 135 
Poor Richard, 56 
Pope, Alexander, 162 
Potash, 19; chickweed as, 143, 

187, 201, 205 
Potato bug, 275 
Prince Edward Island, 119 
Profits in fruit-farming, 240-271 
Prunes (plums), 90, 91 
Pyrethrum, no 



Q 



Quince, 95 



348 



Index 



Raffael, 25 
Raspberries, 107, 108 
Richmond, Early (cherry), 6; 

see Cherry 
Riviera, 273 
"Roccolo," a, 301 
Root- worm, 152 
Roots, setting out, 72, 75; spacing 

(table), 73 
Rust, 108 



Scale, 88, 91, 156; propagation, 

282 ; (see also Birds) 
Scott, Sir Walter, 26 
Shakespeare, cited, 1, 25, 26, 53, 

215, 326; quoted, 256, 317, 318 
Silurian Age, 42 
Smedley, Dr. James, 331 
Snow as cover crop, 145 
Soil, cropping, 200; drainage (see); 

dead, 193; exhaustion, 233; 

making, 181; preparation, 176, 

181, 183, 197, 198, 235 
South America, 49 
Spencer, Herbert, 326 
South Carolina rock, 202 
Spraying, 151, 159, 160 (see 

also Birds, Scale) 
Spraying machines, 159, 160 
Stone Age, 35 
Strawberries, 105, 106 



Sub-soiling, 79, 80, 81; (see also 
Drainage) 



Tacitus, 25 
Tankage, 202 
Taylor, General, 19 
Texas, 126 

Thanksgiving Day, 322 
Thrip, the, 158 
Tivoli, 324 



Vines, 140 (see Grapes) 
Virgil, 25 

W 

Walpole, 113 

Washington, George, 27, 53, 58, 

215 
Waterloo, 335 

Watering the ground, 190, 191 
Weather, the, 15; signs, 256-258 
Webster, cited, 58; quoted, 19, 

23 
Wesley, John, quoted, 54 
White, President, cited, 120 
Whitman, Walt, 324 



Zeno, 326 



J2 Selection from the 
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The Art of 
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Its Development and Its Application to 
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Field Book of 

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New York London 



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A Description of the Character and 
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H Si 111 



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